Thematic Roles Affect Reference Form Selection

There are many factors that affects reference production and comprehension such as word form and semantic or grammatical role.In the text comprehension,most of studies are focusing on the factors that affect reference comprehension.However in language production,many studies mainly focusing on the form and selection of anaphora.Speakers generally use reduced forms,such as pronouns or zeros,to refer the person who is the topic of the conversation,and who can be assumed to be in the center of attention.Speakers use more specific forms such as names to introduce people for the first time,or to talk about someone who hasn't been mentioned recently.However,whether thematic role influence the choice of reference and it's form is still unclear.Anrold argued that the goal-source role indeed influence the reference choice and it's form they use the in-person story-continuation paradigms to test this hypothesis,found that compared to the source character,participants use more reduced form to refer the goal character.However,Fukumura& van Gompel found that there are no difference in goal character or source character when it comes to the use of reduced form in thematic roles.In order to test these argument in Chinese language system,we run a story-continuation paradigm and one sentence-continuation paradigm to test this question.we found that thematic role do influence the choice of reference which only occur in rich context situation.