Linguistic and cognitive prominence in anaphor resolution: topic, contrastive focus and pronouns

Abstract This paper examines the role that linguistic and cognitive prominence play in the resolution of anaphor–antecedent relationships. In two experiments, we found that pronouns are immediately sensitive to the cognitive prominence of potential antecedents when other antecedent selection cues are uninformative. In experiment 1, results suggest that despite their theoret-ical dissimilarities, topic and contrastive focus both serve to enhance cognitive prominence. Results from experi-ment 2 suggest that the contrastive prosody appropriate for focus constructions may also play an important role in enhancing cognitive prominence. Thus different types of linguistic prominence (topic, contrastive focus) ap-pear to have the common effect of increasing the cog-nitive prominence of the discourse referent. For pronouns with two possible antecedents, the cognitive prominence of an antecedent aids in anaphor resolution, immediately biasing selection towards the more promi-nent (and ultimately preferred) antecedent