Certain verbs tend to elicit explanations about either their subject or their object. The tendency for one of the verb’s arguments to be rementioned in explanations is known as the implicit causality bias. In this paper we investigate the conditions underlying implicit causality remention biases by means of sentence and story completion studies. On one account of implicit causality, remention biases are the product of a combination of a particular lexico-semantic structure with a causal coherence relation. According to a competing account, the biases arise from a perceived lack of information in the discourse, and thus depend on knowledge about the world and the discourse context. To distinguish between the two accounts, it first needs to be established that information that potentially competes with implicit causality, such as relevant information from the discourse context, can reliably influence remention biases. We provide evidence that a violation of implicit assumptions underlying the standard use of implicit causality verbs leads to different inferences, and an alteration of the remention bias. We thereby lay the groundwork for future studies to distinguish between the two accounts.

This study investigates how the strength of referential biases associated with implicit vs explicit causality predicates in Korean affects Korean-speaking learners’ reference choices in English. Sentence-completion experiments with Korean (Experiment 1a) and English (1b) native speakers showed that Korean speakers referred to the subject more following predicates with explicit vs implicit causality marking, whereas English speakers showed no difference in referential bias for the English translation correspondents of these predicates, which did not contain explicit causality marking. In Experiment 2, Korean learners of English completed an English sentence-completion task, either preceded or followed by a translation task, to test whether strength of referential bias in Korean would affect their referential choices in English. After factoring in individual differences in cross-linguistic associations, results provided evidence that cross-language activation at the word level affects reference processing at a discourse level, with the predicted effect somewhat enhanced by translation priming.

This study investigated Chinese-speaking English learners’ use of implicit causality and consequentiality biases in establishing coreference under a Bayesian view of reference interpretation, which distinguishes between context-based priors about which entity will be re-mentioned and new evidence provided by the referential expression form. In two sentence-completion experiments, participants wrote continuations to sentence fragments with either implicit causality (Experiment 1) or consequentiality (Experiment 2) biases that ended either with or without a pronoun. In both experiments, L2 speakers showed native-like re-mention biases following no-pronoun fragments, indicating native-like predictions about the next-mentioned referent. Following pronoun fragments in NP2-biasing contexts, L2 speakers produced more NP1 continuations than native speakers. We show that this difference lies in different beliefs about pronoun use in the two populations. Specifically, L2 speakers showed a stronger association between pronouns and NP1 referents than native speakers following NP2-biasing verbs.