Choosing anaphoric expressions: Do people take into account likelihood of reference? Kumiko Fukumura * , Roger P.G. van Gompel School of Psychology, University of Dundee, UK article info Article history: Received 28 January 2009 revision received 31 August 2009 Available online 17 October 2009 Keywords: Anaphor Reference Pronouns Repeated name penalty Implicit causality Language production abstract Research has shown that following a sentence fragment such as John impressed Mary because..., people are most likely to refer to John, whereas following John admired Mary because..., Mary is the preferred referent. Two written completion experiments investi- gated whether such semantic biases affect the choice of anaphor (pronouns vs. names). Experiment 1 investigated biases due to verb semantics, and Experiment 2 contrasted biases due to different connectives (because vs. so). Frequency-based accounts such as pro- posed by Arnold (2001) and functional linguists (e.g., Givón, 1988, 1989) suggest that the likelihood of reference to a particular discourse entity should affect the choice of anaphor: more pronouns (relative to names) for the bias-consistent entity than the bias-inconsistent entity. Although the semantics of the verb and connective had strong effects on the choice of referent, neither experiment showed any effect of semantic bias on the choice of ana- phoric form. In contrast, structural factors did affect anaphoric choice. Ó 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Introduction When people refer to a previously mentioned discourse entity, they can use various types of anaphoric expressions such as pronouns, proper names, or definite descriptions. An important question for models of language production is how people choose among different expressions. A gen- eral assumption is that the choice of anaphor depends on the referent’s accessibility or how activated it is in the dis- course representation. When the referent is highly accessi- ble in the discourse, reduced anaphoric expressions such as pronouns tend to be used, whereas when it is less accessi- ble, more explicit expressions such as proper names and definite descriptions are used (Ariel, 1990; Chafe, 1976; Chafe, 1994; Givón, 1983; Grosz, Joshi, & Weinstein, 1995; Gundel, Hedberg, & Zacharski, 1993). Several factors have been identified to affect accessibil- ity and hence the choice of anaphoric expressions. For example, a referent is more accessible when it has been mentioned more recently or more frequently in the pre- ceding discourse, so more reduced anaphoric expressions such as pronouns tend to be used under such conditions (Ariel, 1990; Givón, 1983). Other research has shown that people use more pronouns when the referent is the grammatical subject in sentence-initial position rather than a later-mentioned object in the immediately preced- ing clause (Arnold, 2001; Brennan, 1995; Fletcher, 1984; Stevenson, Crawley, & Kleinman, 1994), consistent with theoretical accounts that claim that the referent’s accessi- bility is affected by structural properties of the preceding sentence such as the antecedent’s grammatical role (e.g., Brennan, Friedman, & Pollard, 1987; Frederiksen, 1981; Gordon, Grosz, & Gilliom, 1993; Grosz et al., 1995) or sur- face sentence position (Gernsbacher & Hargreaves, 1988; Gordon et al., 1993). In this article, we investigate whether the likelihood of referring to an entity, which has been argued to influence the activation of discourse entities, also constrains the form of anaphoric expressions. Many studies have shown that verb semantics influences which entity people are 0749-596X/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2009.09.001 * Corresponding author. Address: School of Psychology, University of Dundee, Dundee DD1 4HN, Scotland, UK. Fax: +44 1382 229993. E-mail address: k.fukumura@dundee.ac.uk (K. Fukumura). Journal of Memory and Language 62 (2010) 52–66 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Memory and Language journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jml