The role of discourse in Italian pronoun interpretation: Investigating variations in experimental results with cognitive modeling

Abstract

This paper investigates to what extent the variations in experimental results on the interpretation of Italian subject pronouns can be explained by the different discourses used in the experimental studies. A cognitive model implemented in ACT-R was used to simulate pronoun processing and interpretation in discourse, which is influenced by the various contexts used in empirical experiments. Our simulations show that the discourse contexts used in the experiments strongly influence the interpretation of Italian subject pronouns, but not to the extent that all data in different experiments can be explained by it. We therefore conclude with suggestions for further research both on the influence of discourse context and the influence of task on the interpretation of Italian pronouns and (linguistic) experiments in general.