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Three experiments investigate the effects of utterance structure and anaphoric reference on discourse comprehension. These factors are examined in the context of utterance pairs with parallel constituent structure (e.g.,Josh criticized Paul. Then Marie insulted him). Previous studies of structural parallelism have shown that an ambiguous pronoun (e.g.,him) is biased to corefer with an antecedent in the same structural position (e.g.,Paul). Of interest was whether parallelism can also influence the capacity for a pronoun to facilitate discourse comprehension and whether the centering model of discourse coherence can account for such effects. Most generally, centering predicts that a pronoun will increase coherence when it corefers with the subject of the previous utterance and that a single pronoun is sufficient to optimize local coherence. Experiment 1 addresses the interpretation of ambiguous pronouns and shows …