How people refer to objects in the world, how people comprehend reference, and how children acquire an understanding of and an ability to use reference.

This volume brings together contributions by prominent researchers in the fields of language processing and language acquisition on topics of common interest: how people refer to objects in the world, how people comprehend such referential expressions, and how children acquire the ability to refer and to understand reference. The contributors first discuss issues related to children's acquisition and processing of reference, then consider evidence of adults' processing of reference from eye-tracking methods (the visual-world paradigm) and from corpora and reading experiments. They go on to discuss such topics as how children resolve ambiguity, children's difficulty in understanding coreference, the use of eye movements to physical objects to measure the accessibility of different referents, the uses of probabilistic and pragmatic information in language comprehension, antecedent accessibility and salience in reference, and neuropsychological data from the event-related potential (ERP) recording literature.

About the Authors

Edward Gibson is Professor of Cognitive Science in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT.

Neal J. Pearlmutter is Associate Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University.

John C. Trueswell is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.

The late Tanya Reinhart was the Interface Chair at Utrecht University, a Global Distinguished Professor at NYU, and the author of Interface Strategies: Optimal and Costly Computations (MIT Press) and other books.

Michael K. Tanenhaus is Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Linguistics at the University of Rochester.

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