#3189. Processing cataphors: Active antecedent search is persistent

July 2026publication date
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Journal’s subject area:
Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous);
Experimental and Cognitive Psychology;
Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology;
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Abstract:
Cataphors precede their antecedents, so they cannot be fully interpreted until those antecedents are encountered. Some researchers propose that cataphors trigger an active search during incremental processing in which the parser predictively posits potential antecedents in upcoming syntactic positions. If a prediction is disconfirmed in an earlier position, the parser should iteratively search later positions until the predicted element is found. Two sentence completion experiments show a strong off-line preference for coreference between a fronted cataphor and the first available argument position (the subject). When the subject cannot be the antecedent, participants posit the antecedent in the next closest position: object position. The results support the claim that antecedent search is active and persistent.
Keywords:
Active parsing; Cataphora; Coreference; Prediction; Self-paced reading; Syntactic processing

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