Degand, L., Lefevre, N., & Bestgen, Y. (1999). The impact of connectives and anaphoric expressions on expository discourse comprehension. Document Design, 1(1), 39-51.

Degand, L.; Lefevre, N.; Bestgen, Y.

1999

Degand, L., Lefevre, N., & Bestgen, Y. (1999). The impact of connectives and anaphoric expressions on expository discourse comprehension. Document Design, 1(1), 39-51.

geen

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 they provide the reader with the impression of having understood the text instead of a real understanding. The objective of the experiment was to test this far-reaching hypothesis for the use of connectives in expository texts. We wanted to determine the impact of causal connectives such as parce que 'because' & donc 'so' on comprehension & on the feeling of understanding, contrasting it with the impact of anaphoric expressions. Contrary to previous results, our experiment shows that the presence of connectives actually improved comprehension, but did not have an impact on the perception of understanding.

Connectives significantly improve comprehension. In addition, the relational markers affect both the manipulated relations they signals and the other parts of the text. This leads us to the conclusion that relational marking plays a crucial role in the global mental representation by the reader. Lack of signaling seems indeed to lead to a disturbed (or less well constructed) mental representation, since comprehension of other parts of the text is also affected.

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