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.

German has two demonstrative pronouns: the der, die, das paradigm and the dieser, diese, dies(es) paradigm. Previous studies mainly compared the anaphoric use of der with the personal pronoun er and observed that der refers to less prominent antecedents. However, there are only very few studies that have investigated the differences between these two demonstrative pronouns. We hypothesize that they differ in signaling topic persistence and in accessing contrastive antecedents. We tested these hypotheses in short texts that manipulated the contrast of the antecedent by inducing the expression ‘in contrast to’ vs. ‘together with’ (e.g., the cellist in contrast to the flautist vs. the cellist together with the flautist). Results from our eye-tracking reading Experiment (Experiment 1), in which participants’ eye- movements were monitored while reading sentences, show that (i) readers preferred dieser when referring to the topic of a sentence, and (ii) dieser caused less processing difficulties than der in both contrast and no-contrast contexts. Our sentence completion Experiment (Experiment 2) also confirmed that der and dieser are both used for anaphoric reference to a topical antecedent. Collectively, our experiments provide evidence that dieser functions as inducing topic persistence. These results suggest that there is a need for further experimental investigation into the semantic factors and informational structures influencing the usage of demonstrative pronouns in German.