Abstract：A crucial component of natural language comprehension involves connecting clauses and phrases together in order to establish a coherent discourse . There are two kinds of coherence : relational coherence and referential coherence . The latter means the establishment of coherence by the use of referring expressions .Different languages have different ways to express an entity,such as noun phrase,pronoun or zero .They also have different preferences while expressing entities which vary according to the prominence in the cognitive state .If an entity is more prominent,usually a reduced linguistic form is preferred,like a zero in Chinese and a pronoun in English .If an entity is less prominent,a more specific form like a noun phrase is preferred . Linguistic and psycholinguistic studies on referential coherence have shown and claimed that referent prominence is related to its predictability : first,the way it is expressed;second,the likelihood of being mentioned in the continuation (i .e .the likelihood of upcoming mention) . The higher prominence an entity has,the more predictable it is and the more likely it is to be continued in the subsequent discourse . Studies are done on factors which determine the prominence of a discourse entity in question . One well-known account of discourse processing with implications on pronominal resolution is Centering Theory,which predicts that pronouns prefer to have antecedents in subject position instead of entities in object position . On the other hand,Accessibility Theory states that in natural discourse,topics (mainly discourse topics) constitute the most salient entities more often than not . Of these two factors,grammatical role is regarded as a local determinant while the latter,discourse topichood a global one . Based on these insights,this paper teases apart relevant factors and explores their effects and interactions on referent prominence,using a continuation experiment in Chinese .The grammatical roles of entities remain constant but the topicality and reference forms are manipulated in six conditions .Since reoccurrence of the entity in the continuations proves its high accessibility in participants'm ental representations,it is easy to identify which referent is more predictable and prominent by looking at the first subject referent mentioned in their production .We examine the effect of different factors on referent prominence at different stages of the continuation,and also their interaction . Our results show that local grammatical role overrules the global discourse topichood in determining which entity is mentioned again in the early stage of the production .So the syntactic role the referent assumes will decide its prominence .A consistency in subject priorityis evident in the results .However,discourse topichood does influence whether and how an entityis mentioned in the continuation,but at a later phase .Under our experimental conditions there is no interaction between discourse topichood and grammatical subjecthood . Given reference forms in the target sentence do not change their reoccurrence,but influence the forms chosen by the participants in their continuation in two restricted cases in N2-as-topic conditions .
2013, Vol. 43 
