It’s not the words, but how you say them: Effects of referential predictability on the production of names and pronouns

Findings from various domains suggest that predictability is an important component of language processing. We report two psycholinguistic experiments demonstrating that predictability also influences referential processing, in the form of reduced acoustic durations for predictable referents. However, we do not find evidence that predictability directly influences the likelihood of pronominalization, contrary to some prior claims. Instead, our findings reveal that the use and interpretation of pronouns is influenced by thematic role, independently of which referent is most predictable (i.e., most likely to be mentioned next). We also suggest that referents’ likelihood-of-mention is influenced by an interplay of syntactic and semantic factors, in particular the mapping between syntactic roles and thematic roles. As a whole, our results highlight the benefits of exploring not only lexical but also acoustic aspects of referential production.