Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The disambiguation of pronouns is a complicated process that has been shown to be influenced by both linguistic andcognitive factors. In particular, readers prefer an interpretation that is causally likely. For example, in the sentence pairJohn accused Mark of stealing a car. He called the police, readers judge that the antecedent of he is more likely to beJohn than Mark because of the perceived causal link between the accusation and calling the police. I will describe newresults that explore how the presence of negation affects such interpretations (e.g., He did not call the police). While,as expected, negation disrupts the perceived causal link, this disruption does not affect the choice of antecedent (John isstill the preferred antecedent). This suggests that readers identify the unnegated causal relationship when interpreting thenegated sentence. The implication of this result to models of pronoun disambiguation will be discussed.