Comprehension of Referring Expressions in Chinese

Abstract

Studies of English have shown that reduced referential expressions (e.g. pronouns) contribute more to discourse coherence than do unreduced expressions (e.g. proper names). To test the generality of these findings, a series of reading-time studies was conducted to examine the processing of coreference in Chinese discourse. The results obtained for Chinese were similar to those obtained previously for English. Furthermore, comparisons of the comprehension of overt pronouns and zero pronouns (a phologically-null form not present in English) showed that the two types of reduced referring expressions contribute equally to discourse coherence for the kinds of passages studied in the experiments. A formal model of the structure and processing of reference in discourse, developed to handle co-reference phenomena in English, is shown to provide an account of these experimental results on the reading of Chinese.