90 Thursday, March 15: Paper Abstracts

How do listeners process an ambiguous pronoun? The use and interpretation of pronouns depends on linguistic principles, discourse prominence (e.g., Ariel, 1990; Arnold, 1998; Grosz et al., 1995) and pragmatic reasoning (Gundel et al., 1993). This study investigates if and how more general cognitive factors such as processing speed and working memory influence referential processing. We implemented a computational model within the cognitive architecture ACT-R (Anderson, 2007) to explain the processing of referring expressions in discourse. The processing of pronouns is simulated as two related processes. In the first process, the model uses general memory principles to build a discourse representation during sentence comprehension. The accessibility of discourse referents is represented by the activation of elements in memory. The discourse referent with the highest activation is considered as the current discourse topic and is retrieved as the referent of a pronoun. In the second process, the model evaluates whether this referent is a plausible interpretation given the speaker’s choices: The model then takes the speaker’s perspective, and checks whether the speaker could have intended the selected interpretation. Our model integrates accounts of linguistics competence and plausible assumptions about cognitive processing, and is used to generate precise and testable predictions about linguistic performance. We discuss empirical support for two predictions derived from our computational simulations