The role of structure in coreference assignment during sentence comprehension

This paper examines the role of syntactic constraints on the reactivation and assignment of antecedents to explicit and implicit anaphoric elements during sentence comprehension. Evidence from on-line studies examining the time course of coreference processing supports the view that reactivation of potential antecedents is restricted by grammatical constraints when they are available. When structural information cannot serve to constrain antecedent selection, then pragmatic information may play a role, but only at a later point in processing.