Directing internal attention during sentence reading

Selective attention plays a central role in identifying and prioritising relevant memories (internal attention), but internal attention’s involvement in selecting relevant content for language comprehension is not understood. In two preregistered experiments, we tested the utility of anaphoric expressions as retrodictive cues to guide content selection. Participants read sentences, followed by anaphoric expressions (retrocues) that referred back to one of two target words contained in the sentence. Subsequently, participants were prompted to identify which target word had been referred to. We manipulated the predictability of the anaphoric expression across experiments (Experiment 1: predictive; Experiment 2: non-predictive). We show improved response performance for cued words, even when the retrocue was non-predictive. This parallels classic patterns of automatic attentional selection of memory contents in visual working memory. Our findings suggest that anaphoric devices act through internal attention to select language content maintained in memory to serve ongoing comprehension.