Abstract: To establish a coherent representation of a text, what is being read must be in line with previous information in the text. Personal pronouns are among the most important devices to establish coherence between linguistic expressions. Previous studies have shown that world knowledge about gender stereotype plays an important role in pronoun resolution. In other words, comprehension processes will be interrupted when a pronoun mismatches the gender stereotype of its antecedent. However, it is still controversial about the time course of the influence of gender stereotype on pronoun resolution. For example, in some eye movement studies, the gender mismatch effect on reading appeared relatively earlier, while in other studies this effect emerged relatively late. It has been suggested that, among different studies, discrepancies in the distance between a pronoun and its antecedent might be a contributing factor to the controversy. The main purpose of the current study was to examine whether the effect of gender stereotype on pronoun comprehension could be modulated by the distance between the two critical words. In the experiment, 29 Chinese participants were asked to read 160 short passages, during which their eye movements were recorded. Each of these contained a personal pronoun congruent or incongruent with the gender stereotype of its antecedent, while the distance between the two critical words was manipulated to be either short or long. The results revealed that reading times increased when the gender of the pronoun mismatched with the gender stereotype of its antecedent. Interestingly, the location of the mismatching effect varied with the distance between critical words. Specifically, in the short distance condition the mismatch effect was observed on first fixation duration and the second second-pass reading times at the critical pronoun region, whereas in the long distance condition the effect appeared in the second-pass reading times at the region after the pronoun. In addition, the first fixation duration and the gaze durations of congruent sentences were significantly longer at the region following the pronoun in the short distance condition relative to the long one. In sum, our results clearly suggested that both gender stereotype and the distance between a pronoun and its antecedent can affect the comprehension of Chinese pronouns. These findings provide evidence for the interactive model of sentence comprehension.

Key words: pronoun processing, gender stereotype, distance, eye movements