Exploring the Repeated Name Penalty and the Overt Pronoun Penalty in Spanish

Anaphoric expressions such as repeated names, overt pronouns, and null pronouns serve a major role in the creation and maintenance of discourse coherence. The felicitous use of an anaphoric expression is highly dependent on the discourse salience of the entity introduced by the antecedent. Gordon et al. (Cogn Sci 17:311-347, 1993) showed that, in English, sentences containing repeated names were read more slowly than corresponding sentences containing pronouns when the antecedent of the anaphoric expression was the subject of the previous sentence. This effect was dubbed the Repeated Name Penalty (RNP), and it was further found that this processing delay is eliminated if the antecedent of the anaphoric expression is the object of the previous sentence. The RNP was later extended to Mandarin Chinese (Yang et al. in Lang Cogn Process 14:715-743, 1999) and to Spanish (Gelormini-Lezama and Almor in Lang Cogn Process 26(3):437-454, 2011), which suggests that this might be a universal phenomenon. Moreover, the Spanish results showed an additional effect: sentences containing overt pronouns were read more slowly than corresponding sentences containing null pronouns when the antecedent of the anaphoric expression was the subject of the previous sentence. This effect was dubbed the Overt Pronoun Penalty (OPP) and, like the original RNP, the effect is also eliminated if the antecedent is in object position (Gelormini-Lezama and Almor 2011; Gordon et al. 1993). The similarity of the RNP and the OPP in Spanish suggests that these two processing phenomena might be caused by the same underlying principles. This paper is a critical review of the literature on these processing delays in Spanish and an attempt to integrate the data in a unified framework. Specifically, and following pragmatic explanations like the Informational Load Hypothesis (Almor in Psychol Rev 106:748-765, 1999), the RNP and OPP in Spanish can be understood as superficial manifestations of an imbalance between processing cost and discourse function.