Do you know who that is? Representational detail affects discourse focus and anaphor resolution

Establishing referential relations among text elements is critical to establishing discourse coherence. Although resolution of coreference between anaphors and their antecedents is central to many theories of text processing, most address the semantic features of antecedent entities in a minimal way (e.g., via morphological features such as gender and number). However, research shows that semantically rich entities are represented in a different manner than semantically empty ones (e.g., Bill Clinton versus Bill Smith), and that such differences have processing consequences in a variety of cognitive tasks. In two experiments, we investigated how the semantic features of discourse referents affected coreferential processing. Our results indicate that increasing the semantic detail associated with the characters in our experimental sentences increased their psychological prominence in the discourse representation. In Experiment 1, semantic detail increased the relative availability of antecedent entities in memory when they were uniquely identifiable by an anaphoric expression. In Experiment 2, semantic detail also affected the online resolution and integration of anaphor – antecedent relations: semantically rich antecedents that were not otherwise focused in the discourse reliably elicited the repeated-name penalty, an effect known to reflect discourse prominence. In addition, semantic detail seemed to permit recovery from lingering effects of the repeated-name penalty. Our results are consistent with recent evidence that the quality of discourse information affects the construction of a coherent representation, even when it is incidental to structural and referential relations in a text. Models of text processing must incorporate a role for this kind of representational information.