Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When hearing a pronoun, people find its referent effortlessly most of the time. However, across languages, pronominal systems vary: While in one language, a pronoun may point to a referent as a function of its accessibility in discourse, in others, pronoun resolution might rely on a range of different processes, specific to each individual pronominal form. In three studies, using an act-out task in English, German and Polish, we found evidence for an overarching tendency, but also crosslinguistic differences: In general, participants were more likely to relate simple pronouns to single, most salient referents and demonstratives to conceptual composites, but cross-linguistic differences reflect the complexity of each language’s pronominal system. Overall, our results extend the empirical basis for anaphora resolution, refining a model of anaphora resolution as a multifaceted interaction of various linguistic and non-linguistic mechanisms at its core.