The Role of Parallelism in Strategies of Pronoun Comprehension

Two experiments investigated the role of parallelism in strategies of pronoun assignment and tested the proposition that a parallel function strategy and the subject assignment strategy jointly contribute to the interpretation of pronouns. The parallel function strategy interprets a pronoun as coreferential with a preceding noun phrase in the same grammatical role, while the subject assignment strategy interprets a pronoun as coreferential with a preceding subject noun phrase. The results of Experiment I showed that the subject assignment and parallel function strategies jointly constrained assignment. When both strategies yielded the same interpretation, as was the case for subject assignments with subject pronouns, subject assignment preferences were greater than when only the subject assignment strategy was available, as was the case with nonsubject pronouns in partially parallel sentences (i.e., sentences in which the pronoun and antecedent differed grammatically). When the two strategies yielded conflicting assignments, as was the case with nonsubject pronouns in fully parallel sentences, subject assignments were reduced even further and nonsubject assignments were preferred. Experiment 2 replicated the results of Experiment 1 in isolated sentences rather than in short texts and ruled out the idea that a third “parallel order” strategy might be used in partially parallel sentences. We suggest that the subject assignment strategy reflects the topic status of the subject noun phrase, while parallel function reflects the use of correspondences between sentence structures in comprehension. We also suggest that the joint operation of heuristic strategies implies a model of discourse processing in which a number of constraints compete in the interpretation of noun phrases.