Processing and interpretation of sentences with referential ambiguity: special features

Referential ambiguity appears when two or more referents pretend to be chosen as an antecedent for a pronoun. The aim of the present study was to investigate the special features of referentially ambiguous sentences processing and to reveal the main factors that influence ambiguous pronouns interpretation. The results of an eye-tracking experiment showed the ambiguity advantage effect, which is expressed in shorter processing time for ambiguous sentences as compared to unambiguous ones. Furthermore, it was demonstrated that pronoun interpretation is sensitive to syntactic roles of referents, although it operates as part of complex multifactorial analysis. The robust primacy effect in sentence processing was found: first-mentioned participants form the foundation for sentence-level representations. However, this effect does not provide any advantage to the first referent in pronoun interpretation.