Processes involved in the resolution of explicit anaphors

Abstract

Two experiments were conducted to examine the processes involved in the reactivation of antecedents in response to explicit anaphors (i.e., anaphors that are both lexically and conceptually identical to an antecedent). Participants read passages containing anaphors that were either lexically and conceptually identical to a target antecedent, or passages containing anaphors that were lexically identical to but conceptually different from a target antecedent. Experiment 1 demonstrated that explicit anaphors only reactivate target antecedents when they are both lexically and conceptually identical to a target antecedent. However, as the distance between an anaphor and its antecedent increased, even an explicit anaphor did not reactivate a target antecedent. In Experiment 2, an adjective modifier was added to the anaphoric noun phrase, which increased the degree of featural overlap between the anaphoric noun phrase and the target antecedent. With the added information in the anaphoric noun phrase, distant antecedents that were not reactivated in Experiment 1 were reactivated. Results are discussed in terms of antecedent reactivation occurring through a fast‐acting passive resonance process.