It matters how you combine your clauses: Effects of syntactic subordination, connectives, and typographic and prosodic boundaries on the prominence of referents

Timo Buchholz, Jet Hoek, Klaus Von Heusinger


Abstract
Recency affects how accessible referents are, but the effect of recency is mediated by the structure of the discourse. In a series of four pronoun resolution experiments, we examine how the accessibility of referents is impacted by the form of subsequent discourse segments, investigating effects of syntactic subordination, the presence of explicit coherence markers, and typographic and prosodic boundaries. Our findings indicate that syntactic subordination, connectives, and typographic boundaries all additively contribute to whether an intervening clause is perceived as less or more conceptually integrated, and that this affects how strongly that clause blocks access to a preceding referent. However, the type of prosodic boundary was found to interact with syntax in an unforeseen way: only with syntactic subordination did a high boundary seem to increase the perception of the intervening clause as integrated, but not with coordination. Our results speak to the question of how the mental representation of a discourse is affected by the specific form of the discourse, and call for a reconsideration of intonational boundaries as integratedness cues.
Anthology ID:
2026.dnd-17.2
Volume:
Dialogue Discourse Volume 17
Month:
February
Year:
2026
Address:
Chicago, Illinois, USA
Editors:
Pierre Lison, Amir Zeldes
Venue:
DND
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
University of Illinois Chicago
Note:
Pages:
89–126
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.dnd-17.2/
DOI:
10.5210/dad.2026.103
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Timo Buchholz, Jet Hoek, and Klaus Von Heusinger. 2026. It matters how you combine your clauses: Effects of syntactic subordination, connectives, and typographic and prosodic boundaries on the prominence of referents. Dialogue & Discourse, 17:89–126.
Cite (Informal):
It matters how you combine your clauses: Effects of syntactic subordination, connectives, and typographic and prosodic boundaries on the prominence of referents (Buchholz et al., DND 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.dnd-17.2.pdf