THE ROLE OF IMPLICIT CAUSALITY AND GENDER CUE IN THE INTERPRETATION OF PRONOUNS

When two actions or states are described, with one being the cause of the other, a person or object introduced by a full noun phrase in the description of one action or state is often referred to pronominally in the description of the other. A number of factors may influence the ease with which the pronominal reference can be interpreted under these circumstances. We attempt to resolve conflicting results from previous research about which of two such factors - cues from the gender of the pronoun and from the "implicit causality" in the description of the caused event or state - speed the interpretation of pronouns. In two series of experiments, we investigate two hypotheses that might explain this conflict. The first - that implicit causality and gender cue interact differently with the complexity of the inference needed to link cause and effect - we reject. The second - that the use of gender cue is under the reader's strategic control - we, perhaps surprisingly, are led to accept. We discuss these results in relation to the processes that gender cue and congruity contribute to.