Incremental discourse processing: How coherence relations influence the resolution of pronouns

The importance of the discourse level for the study of language and linguistics can hardly be overestimated. The study of text and discourse has become an increasingly important area over the last decades, both in linguistics and in psychology. In this paper we report on experiments which add to our understanding of a crucial process in discourse interpretation: the way in which the integration of clauses takes place. It shows that the position at which the integration takes place depends on the particular coherence relation that holds between sentences. The results once again emphasize the special status of causal relations in discourse processing and representation.