Comprehension of topic shifts by Argentinean college students: Role of discourse marker presence, causal connectivity and prior knowledge

Abstract

The aim of this study was to examine the effect of the presence of the discourse marker ‘then’ (‘despues’ in Spanish), the causal connectivity of the statements, and the prior knowledge of the comprehender on the identification of topic shifts. With this aim, we asked Spanish-speaking college students to read the transcripts of four conversations in Spanish, and to perform a topic identification task with confidence ratings. There were two versions of the materials: discourse markers-present and discourse markers-absent. Half of the participants received prior information on the topic of the conversations and half did not. The presence of ‘then’ did not increase response accuracy to the topic identification task, but it did lead to higher confidence ratings than discourse marker absence. Statements that had a high number of causal connections were identified more often as introducing a topic shift than those that had a low number of them. And, students with no prior knowledge available provided higher confidence ratings than those with prior knowledge available. These results suggest that discourse marker presence, causal connectivity and prior knowledge availability have a role in the construction of a coherent representation of the joint projects that speakers accomplish during a conversation.