Structural Parallelism and Discourse Coherence: A Test of Centering Theory

Abstract

Three experiments investigate the effects of utterance structure and anaphoric reference on discourse comprehension. These factors are examined in the context of utterance pairs with parallel constituent structure (e.g.,Josh criticized Paul. Then Marie insulted him). Previous studies of structural parallelism have shown that an ambiguous pronoun (e.g.,him) is biased to corefer with an antecedent in the same structural position (e.g.,Paul). Of interest was whether parallelism can also influence the capacity for a pronoun to facilitate discourse comprehension and whether the centering model of discourse coherence can account for such effects. Most generally, centering predicts that a pronoun will increase coherence when it corefers with the subject of the previous utterance and that a single pronoun is sufficient to optimize local coherence. Experiment 1 addresses the interpretation of ambiguous pronouns and shows that preferred antecedents for both subject and nonsubject pronouns were entities realized in the same grammatical role. Experiment 2 examines the comprehension of utterances containing a pronoun whose antecedent occupies either a parallel or nonparallel position. The results show that utterances are coherent only when the pronoun corefers with a parallel antecedent. Experiment 3 evaluates how the presence of multiple anaphoric links facilitates comprehension and shows that more than one pronoun may be necessary to make an utterance locally coherent. Overall, the results reveal several limitations in centering theory and suggest that a more detailed account of utterance structure is necessary to capture how coreference influences the coherence of discourse.