Abstract:The primary purpose of the current research is to investigate the division of labor between null pronouns and overt pronouns in Chinese discourse anaphora.Two studies were conducted, with Study 1 (the self-paced reading experiment) investigating comprehension processing and Study 2 (the corpus analysis) investigating production processing. The results indicate that:1) There is a division of labor in promoting discourse coherence:when referring to subject antecedents, the null pronouns play a larger role; when referring to object antecedents, the overt pronouns play a larger role.2) Despite the absence of a clear-cut division of labor in anaphoric interpretation, the null pronouns and overt pronouns diverge in their preference patterns:the null pronouns are significantly biased towards referring to the subject antecedents, whereas the overt pronouns are not significantly biased in comprehension processing and are more mildly subject-based than the null pronouns in production processing.3) The anaphoric biases of null pronouns and overt pronouns are affected by two discourse coherence factors:one is the expectancy of different coherence relations in the discourse, and the other is the contributions of null pronouns and overt pronouns in different coherence relations.