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.

2

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 analyses above confirmed predictions that additive, causal and adversative connectives all led to reading difficulty on the sentence following the connective when that sentence conveyed a relation to the previous sentence that did not match that dictated by the connective. Furthermore, the lack of an interaction in each analysis suggests that the interference associated with each tupe of connective occurred across at least two types of intersentential relations. These results are consistent with the findings of experiment 1 and other research that has showed that readers are knowledgeable of the meanings of connectives.

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