Millis, K. K., & Just, M. A. (1994). The influence of connectives on sentence comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 33(1), 128-147.

Millis, K.; Just, M.

1994

Millis, K. K., & Just, M. A. (1994). The influence of connectives on sentence comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 33(1), 128-147.

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The results of 4 experiments, which involved 239 college students, indicate that the presence of a connective such as because increases the activation level of the 1st clause when placed between 2 clauses of a sentence. Immediately after reading 2 clauses that were either linked or not linked by a connective, Ss judged whether a probe word had been mentioned in 1 of the clauses. The recognition probe times to the verb from the 1st statement were faster when a connective had conjoined the statements than when the statements constituted 2 separate sentences. Exp 2 indicated that the reactivation of the 1st clause occurred at the end of the 2nd statement but not at the beginning of the 2nd statement. The results of Exp 3 revealed that the reactivation effect occurred for related statement pairs but not for unrelated statement pairs. Exp 4 showed that the reactivation effect also generalized to the connective although.

As in the previous experiments, the presence of a connective facilitated probe response times. However, the presence of a connective did not interact with statement (first vs. second) nor the location of the negation, indicating that the connective decreased the probe response times for negated and positive verbs from both statements. Thus, the decrementing of the verb’s activation level by a negation did not eliminate the facilitation of a connective.

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