Repeated names, overt pronouns, and null pronouns in Spanish

Abstract

In two self-paced, sentence-by-sentence reading experiments we examined the difference in the processing of Spanish discourses with repeated names, overt pronouns, and null pronouns in emphatic and nonemphatic contexts. In Experiment 1, repeated names and overt pronouns caused a processing delay when they referred to salient antecedents in nonemphatic contexts. In Experiment 2, both processing delays were eliminated when an emphatic cleft-structure was used. The processing delay caused by overt pronouns referring to salient antecedents in nonemphatic contexts in Spanish contrasts with previous findings in Chinese, where null and overt pronouns elicited similar reading times. We explain both our Spanish findings and the Chinese findings in a unified framework based on the notion of balance between processing cost and discourse function in line with the informational load hypothesis.