We report three reading comprehension experiments investigating the interpretational preferences and processing of pro and overt pronouns in Chinese, a ‘discourse-oriented’ pro-drop language (Huang 1984). Our offline rating experiments showed that both pro and overt pronouns were subject-based, but the preference for the subject antecedents was stronger with pro than with overt pronouns. In addition, these different levels of subject biases were confirmed in a self-paced reading experiment; a processing penalty was incurred with object antecedent interpretation regardless of the pronominal type, but the penalty was bigger for pro than for overt pronouns. These experimental results are consistent with Accessibility theory that less specific anaphoric expressions (e.g. pro) were less likely than more specific anaphoric expressions (e.g. overt pronouns) to refer to a less prominent antecedent (e.g. syntactic object).

中文翻译：

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汉语空显代词的解释偏好

我们报告了三个阅读理解实验，调查了解释偏好和处理亲和明显的中文代词，“话语导向”亲-drop 语言（Huang 1984）。我们的离线评分实验表明，亲和显性代词是基于主语的，但对主语先行词的偏好更强亲而不是用明显的代词。此外，这些不同程度的学科偏见在自定进度阅读实验中得到证实；无论代词类型如何，对象先行解释都会产生处理惩罚，但惩罚更大亲而不是明显的代词。这些实验结果与可访问性理论一致，即不太具体的照应表达（例如亲) 比更具体的照应表达（例如显性代词）更不可能指代不太突出的先行词（例如句法对象）。