Constraining the comprehension of pronominal expressions in Chinese

This paper reports a series of self-paced reading time experiments designed to probe how the reference of pronominal expressions is resolved on-line in (Mandarin) Chinese. It is assumed that pronoun resolution is achieved by narrowing the candidate set of potential antecedents for a pronoun. The experimental evidence reported here indicates that two factors – syntactic prominence and the matching of lexical features (e.g. gender) – play a significant role in filtering this candidate set. It is shown that syntactic prominence and feature matching work in conjunction with each other rather than in a competitive, winner-take-all manner. Furthermore, the evidence suggests that syntactic prominence is sensitive to structural relations rather than exclusively to grammatical functions (such as subject and direct object) or semantic roles (such as agent and patient) as has been assumed in the psycholinguistic literature.