Degand, L., & Sanders, T. (2002). The impact of relational markers on expository text comprehension in L1 and L2. Reading and Writing, 15(7-8), 739-757.

Degand, L.; Sanders, T.

2002

Degand, L., & Sanders, T. (2002). The impact of relational markers on expository text comprehension in L1 and L2. Reading and Writing, 15(7-8), 739-757.

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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 one specific text type: expository texts. Furthermore, the naturalness of the experimental texts was controlled, readers did not need specific background knowledge to understand the texts and the experimental method consisted of open answer questioning. The second goal is to investigate to what extent a supposed effect of linguistic marking depends on readers proficiency in a first or second language. The experiment consisted in the reading of short expository texts in Dutch and French, which both functioned as L1 and L2. The results indicate that readers benefit from the presence of causal relational markers both in L1 and in L2.

Relational markers lead to better answers on comprehension questions after the text had been read. This effect holds for both signaling phrases and connectives. This finding clearly suggests that linguistic markers help readers construct a coherent cognitive representation of the information in the text.

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