Attentional control predicts pronominalization irrespective of competing referents

Two story-continuation experiments replicate a well-known effect whereby speakers use fewer pronouns to refer to the main character of a story when an additional character is present in the scene/discourse. This effect arises even when characters are different sex/gender and a pronoun would be unambiguous, a finding originally attributed to competition for attentional resources in the speaker’s representation of the discourse (Arnold & Griffin, 2007). However earlier work did not explicitly test this account. Here we investigate the role of inhibition and attention switching on referential choice across one- and two-characters scenes in 200 participants aged 19-82. Attentional capacity did not predict pronominalization differences across scenes. Instead, our results lend support to an alternative account whereby lower pronominal use in two-character scenes reflects participants’ accurate assessment that the subject is more likely to be the topic when no additional character is present.