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The aim of the current study is to assess the impact of the wider discourse on pronoun interpretation. We specifically look at German demonstrative pronouns (dieser) in comparison to personal pronouns (er), investigating whether dieser-demonstratives are influenced only by factors in the preceding sentence (specifically, sentence topicality) or whether they are additionally influenced by cues from the wider discourse (i.e., discourse topicality). We found that discourse topicality competes with sentence topicality for prominence, when the two cues are not aligned to one and the same referent. This had an impact on referential interpretation of both personal and demonstrative pronouns, with weakened interpretive biases when sentence and discourse topic did not converge on the same referent (Exp. 3). Our data further indicate that the introduction of a protagonist from a well-known novel blocked the emergence of the discourse topic as a prominence-lending cue for personal pronouns (Exp. 1–2). We propose that reference to the famous protagonist triggers a protagonist layer, which introduces its own set of questions under discussion, which in turn invalidates the discourse topic. Crucially, the demonstrative pronoun dieser does not consider the protagonist layer and only relies on the discourse layer for interpretation.

The study aims to determine if the positive ERP effect associated with self-relevance extends from first to second person pronouns and whether it is independent of the pronoun's referent. Two EEG experiments were conducted with 72 participants listening to two distinct audiobooks, "Tschick" and "Auferstehung der Toten" (AdT). The chosen novels differ in narrative structure, allowing for a comparison of the ERP response of 2sg pronouns that potentially refer to the listener with personal pronouns that do not. The narrative design of "Tschick" directed all 2nd person pronouns to characters in the story, while in "AdT" the listener was the most likely referent. The results reveal a significant positive ERP effect for second person pronouns in "AdT" compared to "Tschick," supporting the hypothesis that the self-relevance effect generalizes to second person pronouns. The findings suggest that this positivity in ERP reflects attentional processes enhancing the cortex's sensitivity to self-other distinctions.