How Robust Is Discourse Processing for Native Readers? The Role of Connectives and the Coherence Relations They Convey

Frontiers in Psychology 13 (2022)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

While corpus studies have shown that discourse connectives that convey the same coherence relation can display subtle differences, research on online discourse processing has only focused on a rather limited set of connectives. Yet, different connectives – for example, rare or polyfunctional ones – might elicit different reading patterns. In order to explore this assumption, we test the robustness of discourse processing for French native speakers by measuring the way they process causal and concessive sentences that are conveyed by either an appropriate or inappropriate connective. Throughout three experiments, we change important characteristics of the connectives: we first test frequently used connectives, secondly less frequent ones, and finally less frequent connectives that are polyfunctional and for which different functions clearly compete. Our results show that the processing for incoherent items was affected for all connectives, however readers showed altered reading fluency when infrequent connectives were used. We conclude that discourse processing is quite robust and that readers are able to insert meaning conveyed by rare connectives while still showing the highest reading ease with frequent connectives.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 98,205

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

From implicit to explicit.Joanna Blochowiak, Cristina Grisot & Liesbeth Degand - 2022 - Pragmatics and Cognition 29 (1):29-58.
Noisy vs. Merely Equivocal Logics.Patrick Allo - 2013 - In Francesco Berto, Edwin Mares, Koji Tanaka & Francesco Paoli (eds.), Paraconsistency: Logic and Applications. Dordrecht, Netherland: Springer. pp. 57--79.

Analytics

Added to PP
2022-04-09

Downloads
14 (#1,173,856)

6 months
7 (#589,206)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?