Effects of topicality in the interpretation of implicit consequentiality: evidence from offline and online referential processing in Korean

Abstract

Abstract There is little consensus as to whether the use of implicit causal biases is driven exclusively by verb semantics or mediated by an interaction of verb semantics and other information sources. We tested whether the topic status of a subject modulates Korean speakers’ referential choices and processing in the interpretation of implicit consequentiality information. Results from two sentence-completion tasks (Experiment 1) showed more subject reference in participants’ continuations when the preceding subject was marked by the topic rather than the nominative marker, regardless of the directionality of the implicit consequentiality bias. In a self-paced reading task (Experiment 2), Korean speakers spent shorter reading times when the referent in the consequence clause was resolved as referring to the previous subject than when it referred to the previous object, although only in the topic-marked condition and not in the nominative-marked condition. Our results suggest that the implicit consequentiality effect remains consistent regardless of the subject’s topic status in the offline tasks, but the effect interacts with the topicality effect in real-time sentence processing. We discuss the implications of our findings for assumptions concerning the underlying mechanisms of referential resolution in discourse including causal bias verbs.