Evidence that Binding Principles Participate in a Constraint Satisfaction Process

Introduction There is a recurrent view that language processing takes place in a cascade, with grammatical principles acting as an automatic filter on what information is made available to semantic and pragmatic processing mechanisms. Alternatively, one may view grammatical principles and semantic and pragmatic knowledge as applying more or less simultaneously (as the relevant information is encountered or accessed) to constrain the interpretation of an utterance. The domain of pronoun interpretation is a potentially fertile ground for addressing and evaluating these conflicting views both because there are well known grammatical constraints on pronoun interpretation and because there are several experimental techniques which allow one to examine various aspects of the interpretive processes. Although the process of pronoun interpretation has received considerable attention in psycholinguistic research, few studies have focused on the role that grammatical principles play in the course of interpretation. A notable exception to this is the cross-modal priming study of pronoun and reflexives presented in Nicol and Swinney (1989). In that study, subjects listened to sentences like those in (1), and were asked to make lexical decisions about target words at a point simultaneous to the pronoun offset (indicated by a pound sign (#) in the example).