The On-Line Resolution of Pronominal Anaphora

Only a small number of studies addressed to the question of anaphoric reference have used on-line techniques to investigate the activation of the referent. An experiment is presented that employs cross-modal priming to look at the resolution of anaphoric reference. Subjects were given a visual lexical decision test simultaneous with an auditorily presented sentence. The results revealed selective semantic activation of the referent of the pronoun on the basis of the lexical properties of the pronoun; this activation occurred directly on recognition of the pronoun. This finding is discussed in relation to existing models of pronoun assignment.