Murray, J. D. (1997). Connectives and narrative text: The role of continuity. Memory & Cognition, 25(2), 227-236.
Murray, J.
1997
Murray, J. D. (1997). Connectives and narrative text: The role of continuity. Memory & Cognition, 25(2), 227-236.
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Connectives are devices that signal the relation between adjacent sentences. Recently there has been a surge of research interest in the role played by connectives in on-line processing. The present research tested the hypothesis that connectives will impact on-line processing to the extent that they signal a text event that represents a departure from the continuity of the events stated in the text. In experiment 1, participants generated sentences to follow a stimulus sentence. An additive, causal, or adversative connective (or no connective) was provided to serve as the first word of the participants' sentence. Results showed that sentences generated in response to additive or causal connectives depicted text events that were continuous with the stimulus text. In contrast, sentences generated in response to adversative connectives depicted discontiuous text events. In experiments 2 and 3, participants read coherent sentence pairs containing inappropriately placed additive, causal or adversative connectives. Support for the continuity hypothesis was found when it was shown that adversative connectives led to the greatest amount of processing disruption, as measured by longer reading time on the postconnective sentence (experiment 2) and lower ratings of coherence (experiment 3). Future research in this area is discussed.
The data from this experiment lend support to the notion that connectives are powerful indicators of continuity and discontinuity in text. Furthermore, connectives clearly differ in terms of whether they predominantly signal continuity of discontinuity. As previous research has shown, additive and causal connectives indicate that the next clause will continue the text event stated in the previous clause in a forward, linear manner. Adversatives, in contrast, indicate a disruption in continuity. That participants interpreted the lack of a connector as a cue of continuity supports the notion that readers' default assumption in reading is that subsequent sentences follow continuously from one another.
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