Dutch speakers take referent predictability into account, irrespective of addressee presence

The fragments were accompanied by pictures that made clear how the story continued. Half of the participants performed the task without anyone else being present, while the other half told the stories to another person, who had to pick out the correct picture. Referent predictability was varied by manipulating the coherence relation in the narrative context.

In addition, I calculated a surprisal score for each character in each narrative, as a more direct measure of its predictability. The results showed that as predictability increased, speakers were indeed more likely to use a pronoun than a definite NP to refer to the target character in their continuations. However, it did not matter whether the speaker was telling the stories to a co-present addressee or not.

The results are discussed in light of accounts that distinguish between taking the perspective of a specific and that of a hypothetical listener.