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Linguistic and psycholinguistic research (Ariel 1990, Brennan 1995, Chafe 1976, Givón 1983, among others) observed that recency of mention, or the distance between antecedent and anaphor implacts the likelihood of pronominalization. Recency can be measured by taking into account the last 20 clauses or more to the left of the referent (Givón 1983, du Bois 1987), or only several clauses back (Clark and Sengul 1979, Brennan et al. 1987, Ariel 1988). However, many studies acknowledge the importance of the immediately previous clause in reference resolution in comparison to referents mentioned two or three clauses back. The general idea is that recently mentiond referents are more likely to be pronominalized compared to referents mentioned more clauses back. Let us consider example (10), which introduces two referents, Paul and a girl. Recency of mention affects the type of referring expression used to refer back to these referents. In sentence (10a), the referent of the girl is picked up in the immediately following sentence, thus, the use of a pronoun is felicitous. In (10b), a sentence intervenes between the two referring expressions associated with the referent of the girl and a full lexical noun phrase is preferred to pick up the referent in the last sentence.

Example (10) seems to indicate that if several sentences intervene between two mentions of the same referent, then the mental representation of this referent decreases in activation and referring back to this referent by means of a pronoun is less likely. Furthermore, if an entity has not been recently mentioned, other referents that have been mentioned in the intervening sentences might compete for the same accessibility status. Besides recency of mention, givenness has also been associated with accessible information.