Implicit causality can affect pronoun use in fragment completion tasks.

Abstract

An unresolved debate questions whether speakers tend to use less specific referential expressions, like pronouns, when the referent is predictable within the context. Numerous studies test this question with implicit causality (IC), which elicits a strong expectation for the implicit cause to be mentioned. Using fragment completion tasks, several studies found that speakers do not use more pronouns for the implicit cause (e.g., Fukumura & van Gompel, 2010; Rohde & Kehler, 2014). However, a recent study found an effect of implicit causality on pronoun use, using a verbal story retelling paradigm with a rich context (Weatherford & Arnold, 2021). What accounts for these different findings? Two major methodological differences are that the storytelling task engaged participants in social interaction and used more richly contextualized stimuli than the fragment completion task. The present study further tests whether fragment completion tasks are capable of detecting the effect of implicit causality on pronoun use with elaborated stimuli and when there is social interaction. We found that implicit causality did indeed guide pronoun use, but only in a context that is socially interactive. These findings suggest that predictability increases pronoun use, but observing this effect is more likely in tasks where the producer is engaged in the discourse. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).