Predicting Definiteness: The Impact of Definiteness Information on Comprehender Expectations

Definiteness plays an important role in signaling the status of a discourse referent. In English, one of the ways in which definiteness can be encoded is on the article of a noun phrase. Which article is appropriate in a certain discourse context is a matter of the status of the discourse referent the noun phrase refers to. The referents of NPs with the definite article “the” are usually old, already mentioned in prior discourse, whereas those of NPs with the indefinite article “a” are usually new. In principle, comprehenders might use these facts to predict what kind of noun will follow either article. The current project asks whether they are able to make use of this information at all, and if so, how fast they can incorporate definiteness information encoded on the article into predictions about the upcoming noun in online processing. The question of whether and how quickly comprehenders use definiteness information bears on several important issues in the field of sentence processing. Firstly, it is not clear whether information that is used by comprehenders offline is