Salience and contrast effects in reference resolution: The interpretation of Dutch pronouns and demonstratives

Abstract

We report three experiments on reference resolution in Dutch. The results of two off-line experiments and an eye-tracking study suggest that the interpretation of different referential forms—in particular, “emphatic” strong pronouns, weak pronouns, and demonstrative pronouns—cannot be satisfactorily explained in terms of a single feature of the antecedent. The findings show that while the different preferences of demonstratives pronouns and nonemphatic personal pronouns correlate with the antecedent's grammatical role, the distinction between strong/emphatic personal pronouns and weak personal pronouns cannot be satisfactorily explained by grammatical role. The results suggest that the strong form is sensitive to the presence of contrastive, switched topics. These findings indicate that the form-specific multiple-constraints approach (e.g., Kaiser & Trueswell, 2008) can be extended to the strong/weak distinction and contrast sensitivity. We also discuss the implications of these results for the nature of the form-function mapping in anaphoric paradigms from a Gricean perspective.