What 'you' and 'I' can say about reference resolution and non-structural constraints

Real-time reference resolution has been extensively studied in psycholinguistics. However, there is still debate on what constrains the interpretation of referential forms in real-time.There are two main views regarding how referential forms are interpreted. According to the first view, upon encountering a referential form, comprehenders immediately use binding-theoretic constraints to determine what referents to be considered as potential antecedents. According to the second view, binding-theoretic constraints do not strictly determine what referents to be considered, at least at the early stages of processing. More recently, researchers have looked at the roles of structural and non-structural information in real-time reference resolution. Some studies have shown that structural information determines the set of potential antecedents whereas some others have shown that non-structural information also plays a role. This dissertation examines real-time reference resolution from a cross-linguistic perspective by looking at the Chinese long-distance reflexive ziji. The interpretation of ziji is traditionally argued to be subject to the non-structural person-feature based blocking: ziji cannot be long-distance bound if there is a first or second person pronoun intervening between ziji and the long-distance referent. The first part of the dissertation uses the self-paced reading paradigm to examine whether person-feature based blocking determines comreprehenders' off-line judgments of ziji and contrains what referents comprehenders entertain in real-time. The second part of the dissertation uses the real-world eye-tracking paradigm to investigate whether verb semantics - another type of non-structural information - interacts with person-feature based blocking. The results show that person-feature based blocking does not strictly determine comprehenders' off-line interpretations of ziji - that is, despite blocking, comprehenders still may interpret ziji as referring "blocked" referents. Additionally, comprehenders immediately make use of person-feature cues to determine what referents to consider, as evidenced in the fact that in the presence of first/second person interveners, "blocked" long-distance referents do not compete with local antecedents. Furthermore, verb semantics also influences the interpretation of ziji; however, verb semantics interacts with person-feature based blocking: when verb semantics clashes with person-feature based blocking, the effects of verb semantics are reduced and delayed.;The research presented in this dissertation aims to enrich our understanding of the real-time processing of reflexive forms and provide additional insights into how non-structural constraints influence reference resoltuion.