Referential precedents in spoken language comprehension: A review and meta-analysis

• We conducted a review and meta-analysis on referential precedents in conversation.
• We found a consistent pattern of results across 10 published experiments.
• We identified three different effects with different time courses and effect sizes.
• Common ground accounts for a minor portion of the phenomena.
• Results impose constraints on theorizing, methodology and data analysis.

Listeners’ interpretations of referring expressions are influenced by referential precedents—temporary conventions established in a discourse that associate linguistic expressions with referents. A number of psycholinguistic studies have investigated how much precedent effects depend on beliefs about the speaker’s perspective versus more egocentric, domain-general processes. We review and provide a meta-analysis of visual-world eyetracking studies of precedent use, focusing on three principal effects: (1) a same speaker advantage for maintained precedents; (2) a different speaker advantage for broken precedents; and (3) an overall main effect of precedents. Despite inconsistent claims in the literature, our combined analysis reveals surprisingly consistent evidence supporting the existence of all three effects, but with different temporal profiles. These findings carry important implications for existing theoretical explanations of precedent use, and challenge explanations based solely on the use of information about speakers’ perspectives.