Abstract
is study aims to investigate o ine processing of subject anaphora in Dutch. An important parameter in this study is the di erence between pro drop and non-pro drop languages.
An experiment has been run to investigate whether 27 Czechs that speak Dutch as a second language are able to interpret the referent belonging to a subject anaphora as well as 27 native Dutch speakers. ese anaphors occurred in short Dutch sto- ries with or without a topic shi , a cognitively demanding process where anaphors point to di erent referents in the story. One can expect this to lead to misinterpretation, especially in the case of groups of language users, whose cognitive capacities are already somehow compromised, such as the elderly or non-native speakers of a language.
For the purposes of hierarchisation of subject anaphors, the Givenness Hierarchy has been used. To be able to determine the type of anaphora, the algorithm derived from the Centering eory has been used. e study shows that Czechs fail to interpret the right referent of subject anaphora in the stories with- out the topic shi signi cantly more than the native Dutch control group. is can be explained by the interference between pro drop and non-pro drop languages.
A pronoun signals a topic shi in Czech, while in Dutch, pronouns express topic continuity. Czechs o en also incorrectly interpret the anaphora in the stories with a topic shift , although here the di erence with the control group was not signifcant. is could be explained by the low number of parameters which have been considered during the experimental design.