Repeated Names, Overt Pronouns, and Null Pronouns in Spanish

In two self-paced, sentence-by-sentence reading experiments we examined the difference in the processing of Spanish discourses with repeated names, overt pronouns, and null pronouns in emphatic and non-emphatic contexts. In Experiment 1, repeated names and overt pronouns caused a processing delay when they referred to salient antecedents in non-emphatic contexts. In Experiment 2, both processing delays were eliminated when an emphatic cleft-structure was used. The processing delay caused by overt pronouns referring to salient antecedents in non-emphatic contexts in Spanish contrasts with previous findings in Chinese, where null and overt pronouns elicited similar reading times. We explain both our Spanish findings and the Chinese findings in a unified framework based on the notion of balance between processing cost and discourse function in line with the Informational Load Hypothesis.