Cataphors precede their antecedents, so they cannot be fully interpreted until those antecedents are encountered. Some researchers propose that cataphors trigger an active search during incremental processing in which the parser predictively posits potential antecedents in upcoming syntactic positions (Kazanina et al., Journal of Memory and Language, 56[3], 384–409, 2007). One characteristic of active search is that it is persistent: If a prediction is disconfirmed in an earlier position, the parser should iteratively search later positions until the predicted element is found. Previous research has assumed, but not established, that antecedent search is persistent. In four experiments in English and Norwegian, we test this hypothesis. Two sentence completion experiments show a strong off-line preference for coreference between a fronted cataphor and the first available argument position (the main subject). When the main subject cannot be the antecedent, participants posit the antecedent in the next closest position: object position. Two self-paced reading studies demonstrate that comprehenders actively expect the antecedent of a fronted cataphor to appear in the main clause subject position, and then successively in object position if the subject does not match the cataphor in gender. Our results therefore support the claim that antecedent search is active and persistent.

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When comprehenders predict a specific lexical noun in a highly constraining context, they also activate the grammatical features, such as gender, of that noun. Evidence for such lexically mediated prediction comes from ERP studies that show that comprehenders are surprised by adjectives and determiners that mismatch the features of a highly predictable noun. In this study, we investigated whether comprehenders can (i) predict an abstract noun phrase in an upcoming argument position (without pre-activating a specific lexical item) and (ii) assign morphosyntactic features to the head noun of that phrase. To do so we used the processing of Dutch cataphors as a test case. We tested whether seeing a cataphor in a preposed clause triggered a prediction of a feature-matching antecedent NP in main subject position. If comprehenders predicted a feature-matching subject, we reasoned that they should also expect an agreeing main verb, which comes before the subject because Dutch is a V2 language. A single-word prediction experiment showed that comprehenders expect a main verb matching the number of the cataphor. In a follow-up self-paced reading experiment, we found a number-mismatch effect if the V2 main verb did not agree with the cataphor. We take the results as evidence that comprehenders predicted a matching antecedent in subject position. We argue that the results are better explained as involving prediction of an abstract noun phrase marked for morphological features, rather than a specific lexical item.