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How Robust Is Discourse Processing for Native Readers? The Role of Connectives and the Coherence Relations They Convey
While corpus studies have shown that discourse connectives that convey the same coherence relation can display subtle differences, research on online discourse processing has only focused on a rather limited set of connectives. Yet, different connectives – for example, rare or polyfunctional ones –...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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Frontiers Media S.A.
2022
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Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8886722/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35242084 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.822151 |
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author | Wetzel, Mathis Zufferey, Sandrine Gygax, Pascal |
author_facet | Wetzel, Mathis Zufferey, Sandrine Gygax, Pascal |
author_sort | Wetzel, Mathis |
collection | PubMed |
description | While corpus studies have shown that discourse connectives that convey the same coherence relation can display subtle differences, research on online discourse processing has only focused on a rather limited set of connectives. Yet, different connectives – for example, rare or polyfunctional ones – might elicit different reading patterns. In order to explore this assumption, we test the robustness of discourse processing for French native speakers by measuring the way they process causal and concessive sentences that are conveyed by either an appropriate or inappropriate connective. Throughout three experiments, we change important characteristics of the connectives: we first test frequently used connectives (Experiment 1), secondly less frequent ones (Experiment 2), and finally less frequent connectives that are polyfunctional and for which different functions clearly compete (Experiment 3). Our results show that the processing for incoherent items was affected for all connectives, however readers showed altered reading fluency when infrequent connectives were used. We conclude that discourse processing is quite robust and that readers are able to insert meaning conveyed by rare connectives while still showing the highest reading ease with frequent connectives. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8886722 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-88867222022-03-02 How Robust Is Discourse Processing for Native Readers? The Role of Connectives and the Coherence Relations They Convey Wetzel, Mathis Zufferey, Sandrine Gygax, Pascal Front Psychol Psychology While corpus studies have shown that discourse connectives that convey the same coherence relation can display subtle differences, research on online discourse processing has only focused on a rather limited set of connectives. Yet, different connectives – for example, rare or polyfunctional ones – might elicit different reading patterns. In order to explore this assumption, we test the robustness of discourse processing for French native speakers by measuring the way they process causal and concessive sentences that are conveyed by either an appropriate or inappropriate connective. Throughout three experiments, we change important characteristics of the connectives: we first test frequently used connectives (Experiment 1), secondly less frequent ones (Experiment 2), and finally less frequent connectives that are polyfunctional and for which different functions clearly compete (Experiment 3). Our results show that the processing for incoherent items was affected for all connectives, however readers showed altered reading fluency when infrequent connectives were used. We conclude that discourse processing is quite robust and that readers are able to insert meaning conveyed by rare connectives while still showing the highest reading ease with frequent connectives. Frontiers Media S.A. 2022-02-15 /pmc/articles/PMC8886722/ /pubmed/35242084 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.822151 Text en Copyright © 2022 Wetzel, Zufferey and Gygax. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
spellingShingle | Psychology Wetzel, Mathis Zufferey, Sandrine Gygax, Pascal How Robust Is Discourse Processing for Native Readers? The Role of Connectives and the Coherence Relations They Convey |
title | How Robust Is Discourse Processing for Native Readers? The Role of Connectives and the Coherence Relations They Convey |
title_full | How Robust Is Discourse Processing for Native Readers? The Role of Connectives and the Coherence Relations They Convey |
title_fullStr | How Robust Is Discourse Processing for Native Readers? The Role of Connectives and the Coherence Relations They Convey |
title_full_unstemmed | How Robust Is Discourse Processing for Native Readers? The Role of Connectives and the Coherence Relations They Convey |
title_short | How Robust Is Discourse Processing for Native Readers? The Role of Connectives and the Coherence Relations They Convey |
title_sort | how robust is discourse processing for native readers? the role of connectives and the coherence relations they convey |
topic | Psychology |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8886722/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35242084 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.822151 |
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