Cognitive Science - 2023 - Simovic - How Do Antecedent Semantics Influence Pronoun Interpretation Evidence From Eye

Cognitive Science 47 (2023) e13251
© 2023 The Authors. Cognitive Science published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Cognitive Science
Society (CSS).
ISSN: 1551-6709 online
DOI: 10.1111/cogs.13251
How do Antecedent Semantics Influence Pronoun

Interpretation? Evidence from Eye Movements
Tiana V. Simovic,a,b Craig G. Chambersb
a
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto
b
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Mississauga
Received 15 February 2022; received in revised form 7 December 2022; accepted 19 December 2022
Abstract
Pronoun interpretation is often described as relying on a comprehender’s mental model of discourse.
For example, in some psycholinguistic accounts, interpreting pronouns involves a process of retrieval,
whereby a pronoun is resolved by accessing information from its linguistic antecedent. However, lin-
guistic antecedents are neither necessary nor sufficient for interpreting a pronoun, and even when an
antecedent has been introduced in earlier discourse, there is little evidence for the retrieval of linguistic
form. The current study extends our understanding of pronoun interpretation by examining whether
the semantics of antecedent expressions are retrieved from representations of past discourse. Partici-
pants were instructed to move displayed objects in a Visual World eye-tracking task. In some cases,
the semantics of the antecedent were no longer viable after an instruction was completed (e.g., “Move
the house on the left to area 12,” where the result was that a different house is now the leftmost one).
In this case, retrieving antecedent semantics at the point of hearing a subsequent pronoun (“Now, move
it…”) should entail a processing penalty. Instead, the results showed that antecedent semantics have no
direct effect on interpretation, raising additional questions about the role that retrieval might play in
pronoun interpretation.
Keywords: Pronoun comprehension; Real-time processing; Eye tracking; Semantics; Memory; Atten-
tion
The authors will provide raw data upon request.

Correspondence should be sent to Tiana V. Simovic, Department of Psychology, University of
Toronto, 100 St. George Street, 4th Floor, Sidney Smith Hall, Toronto, ON M5S 3G3, Canada. E-mail:
tiana.simovic@mail.utoronto.ca
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use
is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
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2 of 15 T. V. Simovic, C. G. Chambers / Cognitive Science 47 (2023)
1. Introduction
The interpretation of referring expressions draws on information beyond the immediate

linguistic signal, including the situational context, prior discourse, and world knowledge
(e.g., Ariel, 1998). This is especially evident with pronouns, whose content encodes mini-
mal semantic information about intended referents. Some psycholinguistic frameworks have
characterized pronoun resolution as a retrieval process, whereby pronouns gain their intended
interpretation by accessing antecedents in discourse memory. However, it is widely accepted
that the existence of an antecedent is not a necessary precondition for a pronoun to be under-
stood. Moreover, work in artificial intelligence, linguistics, and philosophy has argued that
the content of referring expressions is often used only indirectly to infer intended meaning,
further obscuring the role that retrieval might play in pronoun interpretation. In the present
study, we use a Visual World methodology to explore the influence of a linguistic antecedent’s
semantics on pronoun interpretation. Listeners follow spoken instructions whose execution
can entail that an earlier-used antecedent expression no longer accurately describes its corre-
sponding referent. The critical question is whether the now-unviable semantic content of the
antecedent term impacts interpretation patterns or the time course of identifying the intended
referent. We use the results to refine conceptions of what might plausibly be retrieved during
pronoun interpretation.
1.1. What do pronouns “connect” to?

The fact that linguistic antecedents often precede coreferential pronouns has shaped our
understanding of how pronouns are understood. In some psycholinguistic accounts, a pro-
cess of “recovering” the intended noun phrase antecedent is central to pronoun interpretation.
Early work in this tradition used terms like reinstatement and reactivation to describe a pro-
cess whereby pronouns trigger the access of stored antecedent information (e.g., Albrecht
& Myers, 1998; Chang, 1980; De Vincenzi, 1999; Klin & Myers, 1993; Myers & O’Brien,
1998; O’Brien, Plewes, & Albrecht, 1990). More recent studies have drawn on the concept
of retrieval, which builds on contemporary frameworks for language processing (e.g., Cun-
nings & Sturt, 2018; Dillon, Mishler, Sloggett, & Phillips, 2013; Keshtiari & Vasishth, 2013;
Kush, Johns, & Van Dyke, 2019; Kush, Lidz, & Phillips, 2015; Lago et al., 2017, 2019; Meyer,
Grigutsch, Schmuck, Gaston, & Friederici, 2015, among others). But is retrieval central to the
pronoun interpretation process, and if so, what exactly is being retrieved? As a starting point,
linguistic theory has characterized pronouns such as she, they, and it as deep anaphors (Han-
kamer & Sag, 1976). This means that, at a minimum, pronouns do not require antecedents
with a strict match at the level of linguistic form. Intuitive evidence comes from examples
like “Carlos ran into Laura at the park. They got a coffee together…” (where “they” is easily
interpreted despite the absence of a unitary syntactic constituent like [Carlos and Laura]), or
the out-of-the-blue statement “I heard she has a new album coming out” (which can easily be
understood to refer to the singer Beyoncé if a song of hers is playing). Another difficulty for a
retrieval account is that the entities available for pronominal reference are often described
as being actively instantiated in the current mental representation of discourse (i.e., the
T. V. Simovic, C. G. Chambers / Cognitive Science 47 (2023) 3 of 15
discourse focus or the set of centered entities, e.g., Ariel, 1990; Grosz & Sidner, 1986; Grosz,
Joshi, & Weinstein, 1983; Sanford & Garrod, 1981; Sidner, 1981). For example, Chafe (1974)
describes these entities as being “on stage” in the mind, and thus activation is not required
(see also Gernsbacher, 1989). If these entities are already actively represented, the relevance
of retrieval—a psychological construct related to long-term memory—becomes somewhat
unclear. Yet other difficulties arise in examples such as the following:
(1) Blend a cup of flour with some butter. Moisten it with some milk, then knead it into
a ball. (From Nash-Webber, 1978)
(2) Whether Bruce buys a used car or a moped, his brother will want to borrow it. (From
Nash-Webber, 1978)
(3) Talker A: Ty got a capybara yesterday.
Talker B: Huh, how do you spell it? (Adapted from Lyons, 1977)
(4) In the end, few MPs attended the meeting in person. They stayed at home and
watched the recording instead. (Adapted from Moxey & Sanford, 1986)
The case in (1) illustrates a situation where the referent for the pronouns is a future mixture
of the explicit antecedents, and in (2), the referent is one of two alternatives that will depend
on the outcome of a hypothetical situation. Thus, neither (1) nor (2) reflect a determinis-
tic match with an antecedent whose semantic content reflects the meaning of the pronoun.
In (3), the antecedent term refers to a conceptual kind, yet its associated pronoun refers to
an orthographic pattern, and in (4), the pronoun refers to the complement set for the given
antecedent, namely the members of parliament who did not attend in person (see also Moxey
& Sanford, 1993). These examples clearly show that pronouns are not simply variables whose
content is inherited by directly retrieving the content of antecedent expressions, even though
the preceding noun phrases bear some “ingredients” of the intended interpretation. Further,
the disparate ways in which the intended interpretation is resolved in these examples highlight
the key role that inferential mechanisms play. Thus, even in contexts where past discourse is
present and used to guide interpretation, it is clear that we cannot treat pronouns as variables
whose meanings are directly inherited from discourse-based information.
It is worth noting that this indirect path to a referent is not specific to the process of pronoun
interpretation. Even with a full noun phrase, comprehenders will draw on its ingredients to
enrich, modify, and sometimes bypass elements of its semantic meaning (e.g., Donnellan,
1966; Hobbs, 1987; Nash-Webber, 1978; Reimer, 1998; Roberts, 1993; Sperber & Wilson,
1986). For example, a child’s description of some crayon scribbles as a cat is understood to
mean “picture of a cat” (and, even so, the referent may lack any visual similarity to an actual
cat). Similarly, a fellow partygoer’s use of the noun phrase the woman drinking a martini can
successfully pick out a person who we ourselves know is just drinking water out of a cocktail
glass (making the term false from a strictly semantic perspective).
Returning to the notion of retrieval, the observations made to this point raise a number
of questions about the value of this construct in a mechanistic account of pronoun resolu-
tion. An additional observation is that past studies exploring the role of explicit antecedents
in language processing have shown that, even when a straightforward linguistic antecedent
is available, there is little evidence that properties of the lexical form of the antecedent are
accessed (e.g., phonological and lexical properties, see Simner & Smyth, 1999; Van Gompel
& Majid, 2004). Further, recent studies testing for activation by measuring semantic relat-
edness effects in English also fail to provide clear evidence in support of a retrieval process
(Lago et al., 2017; 2019). Our goal in the present study is to further explore the potential role
of the antecedent’s semantics, using novel cases that have not, to our knowledge, been used
before in empirical studies of pronoun interpretation. We focus on instances where the out-
come of past actions entails that the semantics of the antecedent term (e.g., the house on the
left) are no longer viable at the time a pronoun is encountered (because that object was moved
and is now the rightmost house in the visual scene). If retrieving information about linguis-
tic antecedents drives pronoun interpretation, a subsequent sentence like “Now, move it to…”
should evoke the content of the linguistic antecedent, which would now denote an entity that
is not the intended referent. However, this strong reliance on antecedent semantics clashes
with the intuition that “it” in this context readily refers to the moved house. Here, we consider
the possibility that retrieval effects might still be evident in the time course of processing,
reflecting assumptions of constraint-satisfaction accounts (Rumelhart, McClelland, & PDP
Research Group, 1986) or dual coding theory (Paivio, 1990). That is, comprehension may
be speeded when linguistic representations (the content of the discourse record) and concep-
tual representations (e.g., an attentionally centered entity in a discourse model) both favor the
same referential candidate, and, by contrast, may be slower when they do not. If, however, the
retrieval of antecedent semantics plays no direct role, a mismatch between the content of the
earlier expression and the intended referent should not pose any difficulty for interpretation.
In the current study, we use eye movements to reveal the time course of identifying the
intended target as the pronoun is heard in real time. These measures can provide more imme-
diate insights into processing than reading-time measures, where effects are typically mea-
sured downstream of the pronoun (e.g., the subsequent text is congruent/incongruent with a
particular interpretation; see Ehrlich & Rayner, 1983; Garrod, Freudenthal, & Boyle, 1994;
Van Gompel & Majid, 2004).
2. Method
2.1. Participants
Twenty-four participants ranging in age from 18 to 32 years (M = 19.46 years, SD = 3.3)
were recruited from the University of Toronto Mississauga campus community. Power analy-
ses (G*Power, Faul, Erdfelder, Lang, & Buchner, 2007) suggest this sample size is sufficient
to detect a medium effect given a within-participant design. All participants were either native
or near-native speakers of English (where the latter learned English before age 7). Participants
received course credit or $12 CAD.
2.2. Apparatus
Gaze was measured with an EyeLink II (SR Research Ltd., Canada) head-mounted eye
tracker operating at 250 Hz. The experiment was implemented using Experiment Builder
Fig. 1. Example critical trial.

Note. S1 and S2 refer to the first and second sentences that participants hear.
(version 2.2.245, SR Research Ltd., 2019) and was presented on a 24" iMac with external
speakers on either side.
2.3. Design
Each trial began with a new set of six objects presented in a 3 × 4 grid whose squares were
consecutively numbered from 1 to 12 via numbers in the background of each box. On critical
trials, two same-category objects (e.g., two houses) constituted the target pair. These objects
differed by a salient characteristic (e.g., pink roof vs. yellow roof) and occupied distinct grid
squares. A second pair of same-category objects (e.g., open lock and closed lock) were present
but not mentioned, and the final two objects belonged to distinct categories (e.g., calculator
and bumper car, see Fig. 1). Images were selected from the Bank of Standardized Stimuli
(BOSS, Brodeur, Dionne-Dostie, Montreuil, & Lepage, 2010) and the Picture Perfect stimulus
set (Saryazdi, Bannon, Rodrigues, Klammer, & Chambers, 2018). On critical trials, members
of the target pair always started on the same horizontal plane. We ensured that none of the
objects in a critical trial had names that began with the same sound (e.g., “frog” and “frying
pan”).
Two prerecorded instructions accompanied each display. These sentences were recorded by
a native English speaker using Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2016). Sound clips were denoised,
and the playback speed of some sentences was adjusted slightly to maintain a uniform speak-
ing rate. On critical trials, the instruction in the first sentence (S1) had the form “Move the
X on the [left/right] to area Y”. As illustrated in Fig. 1, the destination area was varied (e.g.,
area 9 vs. area 12) such that the relative left/right positions of the moved object and other
member of the target pair were either maintained or switched. This had direct consequences
for whether the semantic content of the original description was still applicable when a sub-
sequent pronoun was encountered. The instruction in the second sentence (S2) referred to a
member of the target pair using either a pronoun (“Now, move it to…”), or a full noun phrase
(control conditions: “Now, move the [same/other] house to…”). The full noun phrase control
conditions provided comparison cases involving unambiguous anaphoric reference to either

the object moved in S1 (“the same house”) or the as-yet-unmentioned member of the pair
(“the other house”). We ensured the initial sounds of the critical object names did not overlap
with those in the words “same,” “other,” or “it”.
There were 24 critical trials in total, with six trials per condition. We used four lists to cycle
the pairing of object array to condition and to ensure an equal number of participants on each
list (see Table A1 for the complete list of critical trials). We included 42 filler trials to disguise
the experimental goals and counteract contingencies present in the critical trials, namely the
likelihood of reference to a member of a contrasting pair, the occurrence of pronouns in S2,
the directions in which objects were moved, and reference to the same category across the
two instructions. The full set of trials involved all grid squares as starting points and desti-
nations for moved objects. Two practice trials were included at the beginning to familiarize
participants with the task.
2.4. Procedure
Participants were tested individually in a single session lasting 45–60 min and were
screened for language proficiency (self-report) and color blindness (Ishihara Test, Ishihara,
1917) at the beginning of each session. For the main task, participants were seated approxi-
mately 1 m away from the screen and were then fitted with the eye tracker. Gaze position was
calibrated and validated using a nine-point array. Once calibration was complete, participants
completed two practice trials. Each trial began with a drift correction procedure. The object
array then appeared, and after 2 s, S1 was played. Participants then clicked and dragged the
target object into the stated area. After a 2-s delay, S2 was played. Participants performed the
second action, and then the screen went blank. After a brief pause, the next trial began.
3. Results
We first explored participants’ rate of selecting the intended target (namely, the previously
mentioned object in the pronoun conditions and “same X” noun phrase condition, and the
other member of the target pair in the “other X” noun phrase condition). Overall, the target
was selected 99.7% of the time. There was no statistical difference across the noun phrase
control conditions (NP-other X: 100%, NP-same X: 99.3%). This was also true for the pro-
noun conditions, regardless of whether antecedent semantics were still relevant (hereafter
the Pronoun-Relevant condition: 99.3%) or became irrelevant (Pronoun-Irrelevant condition:
100%). The outcome in the pronoun conditions corroborates the intuition that the semantics
of the linguistic antecedent are readily bypassed, at least in terms of the selected interpre-
tation. However, it is still possible that the Pronoun-Irrelevant condition entails some addi-
tional processing challenges on the way to this interpretation due to a semantic mismatch
during retrieval. To investigate this question, we turn to an exploration of eye fixations as the
descriptions unfold.
Fig. 2. Average proportion of fixations to previously mentioned object.

Note. Time interval begins 200 ms after the description onset and ends 1200 ms after description onset. Error bars
reflect standard error.
Speech landmarks were identified as follows: For the noun phrase conditions, we coded the
description onset as the beginning of “same” or “other”. This is because the article informa-
tion alone (“the”) is indeterminate and could apply to any object. For the pronoun conditions,
the description onset corresponded to the beginning of “it”. Fig. 2 shows fixations to the crit-
ical object mentioned in S1 within an interval beginning 200 ms after the description onset in
S2 (to accommodate the delay between saccadic planning and execution) and ending 1000 ms
later. We first used the VWPre package in R 4.1.0 (R Core Team, 2021; Porretta, Kyröläinen,
van Rij, & Järvikivi, 2016) to calculate average fixations across the interval for each trial.1
As expected, the patterns in the two noun phrase control conditions are distinctly differ-
ent: The NP-same X (relevant) condition showed a strong tendency to fixate the previously
mentioned object. In the NP-other X (irrelevant) condition, participants showed little consid-
eration of this object, reflecting that they were instead directing attention to the other member
of the target pair. Critically, the two pronoun conditions showed remarkably similar trajec-
tories regardless of whether the antecedent semantics were relevant. (Note that the overall
lower peak for pronouns compared to full noun phrases is consistent with past work, e.g.,
Karabanov, Bosch, & König, 2007; Yee, Heller, & Sedivy, 2012.)
We then used both frequentist and Bayesian analyses to explore the pattern of results fur-
ther. For frequentist analyses, we used linear mixed-effects modeling to evaluate the pat-
terns separately for the noun phrase control and pronoun conditions using the lmerTest pack-
age in R (Kuznetsova, Brockhoff, & Christensen, 2017). The dependent measure was the
average likelihood of fixating the previously mentioned object, aggregated across the full
Table 1
Linear mixed-effects modeling results for fixations to previously mentioned object
Noun phrase conditions

Fixed effects Estimate SE df t p
(Intercept) −2.59 0.08 18.66 −33.75 <.001
Same/other −1.04 0.06 244.79 −17.30 <.001
Pronoun conditions
Fixed effects Estimate SE df t p
(Intercept) −2.09 0.13 24.06 −15.72 <.001
Semantics relevant/irrelevant −0.004 0.08 243.13 −0.05 .96
Note.Values are log-transformed.
measurement interval. We attempted to fit maximal random effect structures following Barr,
Levy, Scheepers, and Tily (2013), but these models entailed a singular fit warning. As a
result, we fit simplified models that included intercept terms for participants and items, which
addressed the singular fit warning. The results are shown in Table 1. The maximal model
entailing a singular fit warning is reported in the Supplementary Materials.
Beginning with the control conditions (in which the S2 instruction contained full noun
phrases), the statistics shown in Table 1 confirmed the apparent pattern of difference for when
the instruction contained reference to the “same” or “other” member of the S1 target pair. This
outcome contrasted strongly with the results for the pronoun conditions. Here, there was no
significant difference across conditions, reflecting the near-total overlap in fixation patterns
in Fig. 2.
For completeness, we also calculated, in the pronoun conditions, the proportion of fixa-
tions to the other member of the category mentioned in S1 (see Supplementary Materials for
more details). Interestingly, the other category member was more likely to be fixated on trials
where the moved object had “passed over” it (the relative left-right position was changed:
M = 0.08, relative to when it stayed on the same side: M = 0.05; p < .05). However, this pat-
tern cannot be interpreted as evidence that, upon encountering a pronoun, listeners were acti-
vating antecedent semantics, in turn increasing consideration of the competitor object. This
is because the effect also occurs with full noun phrases—that is, when hearing “Now, move
the same house to…”, there is increased consideration of the other house when the left/right
position of the original house was changed (M = 0.14) versus when it was not changed (M =
0.06), p < .05. The same patterns are also found with a shorter 500 ms time window, ps < .01.
It is also critical to note that this effect begins before the referring expression’s onset (position
changed: M = 0.32; position not changed: M = 0.18; p < .05 in both cases), providing further
evidence that it is not related to the interpretation of a referring expression. We also found that,
when listeners were fixating the competitor object at the onset of the pronoun, there was no
difference in time taken to shift gaze toward the target object (obtained by analyzing the sub-
set of trials where participants were fixating the competitor at pronoun onset, using a linear
mixed-effects model with intercept terms for participants and items: β = -39.19, SE = 32.51,
t = -1.21, p = .25). This result is also inconsistent with a retrieval account, as this account
would predict gaze shifts to be slower in the Pronoun-Irrelevant condition. We believe the
attention directed to the moved object (which, again, was found for full noun phrases and
pronouns alike) may reflect a very general type of spatial indexing observed in some past
studies. For example, Hoover and Richardson (2008) used a task where facts were told by
an animal that either (i) appeared in one screen location and later appeared in another (with
visible signs of burrowing between the two locations) or (ii) disappeared in the first location,
with an identical-looking animal appearing in the second location (giving the impression of
two distinct exemplars). When participants were asked to answer questions about the said
fact, they spontaneously fixated the animal’s first location in the “burrowing” condition, sug-
gesting the sustained representation of spatiotemporal information about objects’ movements
over the course of an event. Importantly, this is not directly related to linguistic reference (see
also Droll & Hayhoe, 2007; Kukona, Altmann, & Kamide, 2014).
Although traditional frequentist methods are apt for capturing differences between groups,
they are less useful for quantifying similarities. To assess the similarity of the two pronoun
conditions, we used Bayesian parameter estimation (BEST, Kruschke, 2013), taking into
account each individual time step of the trajectories. BEST involves a decision procedure
using a highest-density interval and region of practical equivalence (ROPE) that allows one
to accept a null value as a meaningful measure. We conducted this analysis by comparing
the residuals of autoregressive integrated moving average models of the pronoun condition
trajectories. The results corroborated the strikingly similar patterns within the pronoun con-
ditions. That is, 100% of the possible parameter values for the difference between the means
of the pronoun conditions fell within the ROPE of (-0.01, 0.01). This means that the possi-
ble parameter values are credibly equivalent to the null value of 0, signifying no difference
between the trajectories. Readers are referred to the Supplementary Materials for full details.
4. Discussion
The goal of the present study was to assess the influence of antecedent semantics on the
real-time interpretation of pronouns. We used a novel scenario in which the execution of an
action invalidated the descriptive content of an antecedent term. We reasoned that, if pronoun
interpretation is facilitated by retrieving the semantic content of the pronoun’s antecedent, this
scenario should influence judgments and delay referent identification relative to a scenario
where antecedent semantics remain viable. However, listeners’ selection of a target referent
was entirely unaffected by the viability of the antecedent’s semantic content. Further, the
process of real-time referent identification was also unaffected. The precise fixation profile
over time was near-identical regardless of whether the semantic content remained viable or
not, and the similarity of these patterns was substantiated by Bayesian parameter estimation.
Although the current findings appear inconsistent with a retrieval explanation, they are
compatible with many elements articulated in Grosz, Joshi, and Weinstein’s (1995) descrip-
tion of Centering Theory, and in particular, its grounding in Barwise and Perry’s (1983) model
of situation semantics. One central claim of the Centering account is that it is the entity
introduced by an antecedent term, and not the antecedent term itself, that a pronoun con-
nects to. For this reason, the authors are consistent in describing pronouns as “coreferring
with” a preceding noun phrase, and not “referring to.” Further, as we noted in the introduc-
tion, noun phrases in general provide only certain ingredients for determining their referents,
which entails the possibility of meaning shifts across antecedent-pronoun sequences. Grosz
et al. (1995) illustrate this in examples such as the following:
(5) a. The Vice President of the United States is also President of the Senate.
b. Right now, he’s the President’s key person in negotiations with Congress.
c. As Ambassador to China, he handled many tricky negotiations, so he is well-
prepared for this job.
(6) a. John thinks that the telephone is a nuisance.
b. He curses it every day.
c. He doesn’t realize that it is an invention that changed the world.
Here, the pronoun in (5-b) is understood to refer to a specific individual, whereas the
antecedent terms in (5-a) refers abstractly to the position in general. In (6-a) and (6-b), either
a comparatively generic or specific interpretation is possible, however (6-c) is consistent with
only a more generic interpretation. Using these examples, Grosz et al. argue that a referential
expression’s precise meaning is strongly determined by the utterance that contains it, even
when it putatively corefers with an earlier-encountered expression (see also Landman, 1998).
Similar to the points raised in the introduction, this perspective speaks against the notion
implicit in a retrieval-based account that a pronoun’s interpretation can be directly inherited
from an antecedent term.
One possible concern with the materials used in the present study is that locative expres-
sions like “house on the left” might be considered rare or unnatural in situations where objects
are regularly moved because relative location ultimately becomes a transient property of
objects. The task might therefore encourage metalinguistic thinking that is not part of every-
day language comprehension, reducing the value of the findings. We tested this possibility in
an adjunct production task using the same visual displays (details are provided in the Supple-
mentary Materials). Briefly, the results showed that participants routinely use descriptions that
encode relative location (20.4% overall) even though other more salient visual features can be
encoded. Another concern addressed by the adjunct task is the possibility that object descrip-
tions in the first instruction could be treated as “linguistic precedents” (e.g., Brennan & Clark,
1996). In other words, the house on the left could continue to be used even when the referent
in question has become the rightmost house. Although this seems intuitively unlikely, it is
important to rule out because, if this is the case, retrieving the original antecedent label upon
hearing the pronoun would in fact lead to the intended referent. However, the results from
the adjunct task showed that participants consistently updated spatial information when using
locative descriptions to refer to moved objects. In other words, precedents involving locative
left/right descriptions were readily broken when the semantic content of the precedent was no
longer accurate.
Another question raised by the current materials is whether it is important that the refer-
entially distinctive information in the antecedent term was expressed in a modifier phrase.
One could argue, for example, that the semantic content of the head noun was retrieved dur-
ing pronoun interpretation. However, we believe this explanation would be problematic. First,
reference is a property of phrases rather than words, and in natural language, the content of the
head noun does not enjoy a uniformly privileged status in linguistic reference (Dryer, 2004).
These observations make it difficult to argue that modifiers are subordinate to head nouns in
a way where they would be bypassed in the course of retrieval. Further, one can imagine a
version of the current experiment using a two-object display where the initial sentence was
“Move the one on the left…”. In that case, intuitions about the reference of a downstream
pronoun are just as secure as when a semantically rich head noun is used. We also believe the
examples raised in the introduction and above in (5)–(6) speak against the idea that retriev-
ing the head noun of an antecedent term plays a key role in pronoun interpretation. This is
because of the changes in meaning that occur across successive sentences.
The current study focused exclusively on the case of English it, which is unlike pronouns
in languages with grammatical gender because the morphosyntactic features shared by the
pronoun and antecedent are comparatively minimal. Pronouns marked for grammatical gen-
der might be more compatible with the notion that pronoun interpretation involves retrieval
mechanisms. However, there is a risk in assuming that the existence of gender agreement
or its accompanying processing provide prima facie evidence for a retrieval account. This
is because many phenomena involving agreement are not understood in terms of this kind
of mechanism. For example, a sentence beginning “Last week, I…” will likely be followed
by verbs (in the same and subsequent sentences) whose tense marking agrees with the time
expressed in the sentence-initial phrase. However, we are not aware of processing accounts
claiming that the initial phrase (i.e., last week) must be retrieved from memory at each point
where a past tense morpheme is encountered in order to arrive at the intended interpretation.
Beyond the question of pronoun interpretation, the results are compatible with findings
showing that listeners and speakers spontaneously update mental representations based on
past events, and that referential expressions are interpreted relative to these dynamic repre-
sentations (see, e.g., Altmann & Kamide, 2007; Chambers & San Juan, 2008; Ibarra & Tanen-
haus, 2016; Kukona et al., 2014; Williams, Kukona, & Kamide, 2019). It is also interesting to
note the connection between these (and our) findings and work in visual cognition, where the
indexical pointers used for tracking entities (e.g., Pylyshyn, 1989) may be separable from the
information associated with these entities in working memory (Thyer et al., 2022). On this
point, we argue that an explanation in which listeners use event information to amend mental
representations of past discourse (such that a memory representation of the phrase “house on
the right” is edited into “the house on the left” following the object’s displacement) does not
support a retrieval-based account. That is, if neither the form nor the semantics of the original
expression are relevant, and only the location-invariant identity of the nonlinguistic entity is
key, the notion of retrieval risks being vacuous.
In summary, we interpret the current results as showing that, even when linguistic
antecedents are present, their semantic content does not constrain the interpretation of an
unbound pronoun such as it. Instead, the interpretation process appears to operate over
non-linguistic entities, with no direct reliance on specific discourse-encoded content used to
refer to those entities in the past. We recognize that elements of this perspective are explicitly
or implicitly adopted in many approaches to anaphor resolution. However, our goal in the
current study was to explore the role that a retrieval process might play. If neither the form
nor semantic content of an antecedent term play any direct role, it is in turn unclear what is
being retrieved.
Note
1 Data analyses for the manuscript and Supplementary Materials can be found at https:
//osf.io/k7aum/.
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Supporting Information
Additional supporting information may be found

online in the Supporting Information section at the end
of the article.
Supplementary Materials
Supplementary Figure S1
Appendix A: Object arrays

Table A1
List of object arrays on critical trials
Target pair Distractor pair Unrelated objects

houses closed lock open lock bumper car calculator
lunchboxes CAD currency USD currency dropper olive
dogs pointy bulb round bulb campfire wooden fork
boxes halved kiwi whole kiwi cheese grater printer
drinks green grapes red grapes lantern clothes hanger
bikes green lollipop red lollipop thermometer dart
vases compass math compass knife thread
triangles pink rectangle red rectangle hexagon crescent
pencils red wine white wine razor USB stick
lamps bowling pin bowling ball teapot tortoise
cameras globe map combination lock rolling pin
pairs of dice tree with leaves tree, no leaves feather eraser
jars of popcorn elliptical leaf maple leaf sharpener Walkman
televisions closed door open door PC keyboard clothespin
hot dogs green frog brown frog bowl tissue box
cars grizzly bear polar bear pen headphones
mugs rubber ducky ducky with hat tennis racket whistle
jerseys N64 controller PS2 controller crackers bicycle horn
cakes left hand right hand hair dryer bucket
notebooks chocolate donut plain donut fortune cookie PC mouse
balloons analog clock antique clock pistachios tortilla chip
plates lighter match toaster cotton swab
apples chicken raw chicken yarn comb
plants brown egg white egg tomato juice book keychain

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Cognitive Science 47 (2023) e13251

How do Antecedent Semantics Influence Pronoun

The authors will provide raw data upon request.

The interpretation of referring expressions draws on information beyond the immediate

1.1. What do pronouns “connect” to?

Fig. 1. Example critical trial.

conditions provided comparison cases involving unambiguous anaphoric reference to either

Fig. 2. Average proportion of fixations to previously mentioned object.

Noun phrase conditions

Note.Values are log-transformed.

Additional supporting information may be found

Appendix A: Object arrays

Target pair Distractor pair Unrelated objects

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