• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.417-433
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• 2014

This research examined whether Korean-learners of French were sensitive to discourse structure in anaphoric pronoun resolution. In the experiments, participants read three-sentenced stories and made judgements about how the last sentence of each story makes sense in relation to previous two sentences on a 7-point Likert scale. The stories differed in whether the subject of the last sentence continued the subject of the preceding sentence, and whether the subject of the last sentence was mentioned with a pronoun or a proper noun. The results from French participants replicated the patterns shown in previous studies. In contrast, Koreans exhibited greater difficulty in interpreting pronoun-subject sentences than noun-subject sentences regardless of subject continuity. These findings are discussed within the context of developmental perspective, which suggests the processing of co-referential interpretation may interact with language proficiency.