Abstract
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.
Highlights
Discourse connectives are linguistic elements that give information on how to interpret the logical relations between discourse segments, such as causality or concession (Halliday and Hasan, 1976; Sanders et al, 1992)
We examined the way readers processed sentences containing frequent connectives that were either appropriately or inappropriately used to mark concessive and causal relations
Our results show that the resulting incoherence due to inappropriate marking of connectives led to slower reading for items from Segment 6 onward to the response times to the verification questions
Summary
Discourse connectives are linguistic elements that give information on how to interpret the logical relations between discourse segments, such as causality or concession (Halliday and Hasan, 1976; Sanders et al, 1992). Yung et al (2021) identified the frequency of a connective as a factor that influences the preference of a particular connective over another, especially for more simple relations in spoken language While all these results provide strong indications that readers benefit more from frequent connectives than infrequent ones, we hypothesize that a similar effect can be found when looking at online processing, that is, fluency effects while reading. We assess in three self-paced reading experiments, whether potentially complicating characteristics of connectives, such as their frequency and polyfunctionality, trigger different processing patterns, or whether the readers remain unaffected by their uses and decode different coherence relations and resolve incoherence without any altered fluency. We assess the extent of which appropriate and inappropriate uses of donc (“so”) and mais (“but”) affect the online processing of causal and concessive relations As indicated earlier, both connectives can be considered highly frequent in French. When comparing reading times for sentences containing inappropriately marked connectives, inappropriately used concessive connectives (within causal relations) might trigger less pronounced disruption effects than inappropriately used causal ones
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