Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Results of a word-by-word reading experiment argue for a specifically syntactic mechanism (N.B., not a discourse mechanism) that assigns antecedents to pronouns such as he and they, even though such assignments are grammatically optional and likely to be revised in many instances by subsequent discourse processes. These results argue for a modular view of mental architecture along the lines of Fodor (1983). However, this study also draws on certain new proposals concerning possible behaviorally significant variation in the neurophysiological substrates of language processing. Partitioning subjects on certain biological criteria reveals that, while the pattern described above seems to apply to the majority of subjects, there is a large minority that seems to showan importantly different pattern.