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Connectives structure discourse. They help readers build a coherent discourse representation. How they affect the reading process is studied in an eye movement reading experiment that investigates the influence of the connective 'because' on the making of causal inferences in sentences such as "Mr. Smith was delayed because there was a traffic jam on the highway". The results show that the connective calls upon the reader to make a causal inference as well as aids the reader in building a representation of the discourse. The causal inference, which is deduced at the cost of time, is implied by the connective ...

Examined whether normal aging modifies a subsystem of comprehension (i.e, syntactic, semantic) or places unusual demand on working memory related to the distance between constituents that must be integrated. 75 healthy adults (aged 25-79 yrs) were questioned about thematic roles of nouns in sentences with center-embedded or right-branching subordinate clauses. Results indicate that comprehension accuracy declined after age 60 yrs. Although aging did not affect the semantic component, it did affect the syntactic component when evaluated with sentences representing implausible events. There appeared to be an effect of distance between constituents in the 70s decade that was not related solely ...

Investigated the linking of causally related events during reading. Sets of 10-22 sentences were prepared so that each of 30 university students was presented with 10 texts in each of 4 conditions, 2 causal and 2 noncausal. Each text contained a test sentence for which reading time was registered. Mean reading time was shorter for the 2 causal conditions than for the 2 noncausal conditions, indicating that Ss engaged in causal linking during text comprehension. ...

A study conducted with 53 native French-speaking students at the U of Louvain, Belgium, explored the impact of linguistic markers of coherence on the comprehension of expository discourse. The impact of such markers on comprehension (ie, off-line) is a highly controversial topic in current studies, especially for connectives for which a facilitating as well as an interfering role has been demonstrated. It seems that connectives facilitate the comprehension process in that they improve the reading process, but do not increase comprehension of the text. It might even be possible that they ease the reading task in such a way that ...

Reports on an experiment investigating the impact of causal discourse markers (connectives and signaling phrases) on the comprehension of expository texts in L1 and L2. Although several psycholinguistic studies have investigated the impact of connectives and lexical markers of text structure on comprehension, there is no consensus on the exact effect of explicit discourse markers on text understanding; 3 different findings are reported in the literature: markers would have a facilitating effect, an interfering effect or no effect at all. The first goal is to clarify contradictory results by limiting the scope of the study to causal relations, and to ...

We evaluate the predictions of two theories of syntactic processing complexity, dependency locality theory (DLT) and surprisal, against the Dundee Corpus, which contains the eye-tracking record of 10 participants reading 51,000 words of newspaper text. Our results show that DLT integration cost is not a significant predictor of reading times for arbitrary words in the corpus. However, DLT successfully predicts reading times for nouns. We also find evidence for integration cost effects at auxiliaries, not predicted by DLT. For surprisal, we demonstrate that an unlexicalized formulation of surprisal can predict reading times for arbitrary words in the corpus. Comparing DLT ...

We evaluate the predictions of two theories of syntactic processing complexity, dependency locality theory (DLT) and surprisal, against the Dundee Corpus, which contains the eye-tracking record of 10 participants reading 51,000 words of newspaper text. Our results show that DLT integration cost is not a significant predictor of reading times for arbitrary words in the corpus. However, DLT successfully predicts reading times for nouns. We also find evidence for integration cost effects at auxiliaries, not predicted by DLT. For surprisal, we demonstrate that an unlexicalized formulation of surprisal can predict reading times for arbitrary words in the corpus. Comparing DLT ...

112 undergraduates read a literature text preceded by either a comparative advance organizer or a placebo introduction. Three hypotheses regarding the interactive effects of the organizer treatment and reasoning skills were tested: the assimilation, the schema plus correction, and the assimilation plus correction hypotheses. Findings favor the assimilation plus correction view, which holds that schema-implied text units are assimilated and obscured in the final text encoding, whereas ideas representing unexpected, schema-modifying information are enhanced. The dominant treatment effect was assimilatory loss of detail associated with implied information. Positive effects on schema-modifying information were observed for Ss with good reasoning skills, ...

How readers consume and recall news presented in online and print versions of two newspapers in the Netherlands are investigated in this experimental study. Few differences are found between the online and print versions in terms of news supply. Reader attention to the news stories varies, depending on the newspaper and news category. No consistent reading pattern is evident and the print version readers do not read more than the online version readers. News Consumption seems to be more dependent on the news category, reader gender and interest in a particular topic than on whether the news appears in print ...

Recent research has suggested that reading involves the mental simulation of events and actions described in a text. It is possible however that previous findings did not tap into processes engaged during natural reading but rather those triggered by task demands. The present study examined whether readers spontaneously mentally simulate the actions described in simple narratives by using a memory task that did not encourage the formation of mental images. During encoding, participants read event scenarios preceded by 'I', 'You', or 'He', and then 10 min (Experiment 1) or 3 days later (Experiment 2), we examined memory for action and ...