Abstract: Anaphora refers to a phenomenon in which a linguistic element obtains its meaning via a previously existing unit or meaning. The study of anaphoric processing has always been one of the foci in cognitive science. The relevant ERP studies demonstrate that the understanding of anaphoric expression complies more with the parallel model of language processing, whose different stages are all affected and restricted by such factors as semantics, pragmatics, the frequency of antecedent, and the different forms of anaphora. Therefore, the future research should go deep into some issues like the Nref Effect, the null anaphor, the interaction of various factors in anaphoric processing, and the anaphora in Chinese.

Key words: anaphora, anaphor, antecedent, ERP