Cevasco, J. (2007). The role of connectives in the comprehension of spontaneous spoken discourse. The Spanish Journal of Psychology, 12 (1), 56-65.
Cevasco, J.
2007
Cevasco, J. (2007). The role of connectives in the comprehension of spontaneous spoken discourse. The Spanish Journal of Psychology, 12 (1), 56-65.
The role of connectives in the comprehension of spontaneous discourse was investigated in a series of experiments that tested the effect of the connective 'but' in the realization of causal inferences and the integration of adjacent statements. The role of this connective in the realization of causal inferences was tested through a sentence recognition task and a judgment task. The sentence recognition task required participants to recognize statements that were causally connected to the second statement of the pair as they listened to conversations (Experiment 1). The judgment task required participants to decide whether a sentence causally connected to the second statement of the pair helped them understand the last statement they had heard or not (Experiment 3). The role of 'but' in the integration of the adjacent statements was tested through a sentence recognition task and a word monitoring task. The sentence recognition task measured participants' recognition of the re-presentation of the first statement of the spoken pair (Experiment 2), and the word-monitoring task required for participants to monitor for words in the second statement of the pair (Experiment 3). The presence of the connective resulted in shorter reaction times for causal inferences when measured through the judgment task (Experiment 3), but not when measured through the sentence recognition task (Experiment 1). The presence of the connective did not result in shorter reaction times for the integration of adjacent statements, as measured by the sentence recognition (Experiment 2) or word monitoring tasks (Experiment 3). Taken together, these results suggest that comprehenders are able to make use of connectives to help them create and decide on the existence of causal connections, but not to process and recognize the surface form of the first or the second statement of the pair.
In conclusion, according to this study, listeners are able to construct coherent relations among the statements they hear, as they hear them. Connectives, as linguistic cues, appear to help them to do that. Thus, is seems that the mental representation of two spoken statements conjoined by a connective and the mental representation of two statements spoken in isolation are not the same.
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