Comprehension of pronouns

An experiment is reported in which subjects had to choose referents for pronouns in sentences such as: John blamed Bill because he spilt the coffee. To examine whether the choice of referent is influenced by features of the main verb or by the events described in the sentence, the relation between the events was altered by changing the conjunction. A significant effect of conjunction was obtained, but only when both antecedents matched the gender of the pronoun. When only one antecedent matched the pronoun, referents were chosen faster. From these results it is argued that readers use general knowledge to select referents for pronouns when gender does not identify a unique referent. A further effect of sentence structure on the time taken to select a referent was interpreted as showing that subjects analysed the sentences clause by clause.