The processing of it and this in written narrative discourse

Two experiments explored the hypothesis that anaphors and demonstratives signal different procedural instructions: while the anaphor it brings a concrete entity into a reader’s focus, the demonstrative this directs the focus to a predicate proposition in a discourse representation. The findings from an online eye-tracking reading experiment confirm that preferences for it and this differ as predicted.
Moreover, a sentence-completion experiment revealed converging evidence for this difference, with clear differences in antecedent preferences for it and this. Overall, findings show that the processing and use of anaphoric expressions is affected by the interaction between the lexical characteristics of referential forms and different types of referent.