Measured Coherence

Abstract. This paper reports on an experiment carried out with six groups of Latin-American college students. Subjects were presented with stimulus sentences with a gap produced by the removal, from an original sentence, of an anaphor (si) or a deictic (él). They were asked to fill in the gap. Two contexts were distinguished; the 'micro-context' provided by the presence vs. absence of the word mismo, and the 'macro-context', made up ofthe remainder of the stimulus. It turned out that the effect of the 'macro-context' is less than that of the 'mini-context', but that the very notion of a 'mini-context' is questionable, since si mismo may be processed as a single unit.