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Using referential processing in discourse featuring implicit causality verbs as a test case, we demonstrate how a discourse's causal and temporal dimensions interact. We show that referential processing is affected by multiple discourse biases, and that these biases do not have uniform effects. In three discourse continuation experiments, we show that the bias to re-mention a particular referent in discourse involving implicit causality verbs is not only affected by the verb's implicit causality bias, but also by the discourse's temporal structure, which at times, can even override the implicit causality bias. Our results add to the growing number of studies that show how various discourse dimensions interact in discourse processing.

This work provides evidence that Subject Island violation effects vanish if subject-embedded gaps are made as frequent and pragmatically felicitous as non-island counterpart controls. We argue that Subject Island effects are caused by the fact that subject-embedded gaps are pragmatically unusual – as the informational focus does not usually correspond to a dependant of the subject phrase – and therefore are highly contrary to comprehenders’ expectations about the distribution of filler–gap dependencies (Chaves 2013, Hofmeister, Casasanto & Sag 2013). This not only explains why sentences with subject-embedded gaps often become more acceptable ‘parasitically’, in the presence of a second gap outside the island, but also explains why some Subject Island violations fail to exhibit any amelioration with repetition (Sprouse 2009, Crawford 2011, Goodall 2011); some ameliorate marginally (Snyder 2000, 2017) or moderately (Hiramatsu 2000, Clausen 2011, Chaves & Dery 2014), and others become fully acceptable, as in our case. This conclusion extends to self-paced reading Subject Island studies (Stowe 1986, Kurtzman & Crawford 1991, Pickering, Barton & Shillcock 1994, Phillips 2006), which sometimes find evidence of gap filling and sometimes do not.

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