Levels of representation in the interpretation of anaphoric reference and instrument inference

The level of representation accessed when inferences are made during sentence comprehension was examined. The inferences investigated included antecedent assignment for both definite noun phrase anaphors and pronouns and also instrument inferences. In making these inferences, a listener must access the inferred element, whether an antecedent or an instrument, in either a linguistic form representation or a discourse model. The level of representation involved in these inferences was determined by exploiting differences in the lexical decision and naming tasks, which were argued to exhibit differential sensitivity to representational levels. In three experiments, the priming of antecedent and instrument targets in the lexical decision task was compared with priming of the same targets in the naming task. Differences in the patterns of activation across the two tasks indicated that all three types of inferences required accessing elements in a discourse model. Three control experiments ruled out simple context or congruity checking as an explanation for our results. The following conclusions were also supported by these studies: (1) Antecedent assignment occurs immediately after processing an anaphor; (2) antecedent assignment involves inhibition for the inappropriate antecedent rather than facilitation for the appropriate antecedent; (3) although subjects do not make instrument inferences when they hear isolated sentences containing verbs that strongly imply certain instruments, the inferences are made when sentences are preceded by a context that mentions the instrument.