The goal of this study was to examine how type of anaphoric expressions consisting of pronouns and proper names influence discourse comprehension in Korean. In Experiment 1, using a self-paced reading task, reading times of passages with pronouns and proper names in different syntactic positions were compared. Experiment 1 showed that passages with repeated-names were read faster compared to passages with pronouns, indicating that the coherence of the discourse was more easily established by the use of repeated-names than by pronouns. In Experiment 2, eye tracking was used to investigate the same factors of the different form of referring expressions as in Experiment 1. The results of Experiment 2 showed that the reading times of the sentences containing pronouns as the referential expressions were faster compared to those with repeated-names as the referential expression, in contrast to Experiment 1. The results of these experiments provide an opportunity to compare the effect of anaphoric expressions of the results in Korean with those previously obtained from English language.
