Abstract
Discourse connectives are lexical items like “but” and “so” that are well-known to influence the online processing of the discourse relations they convey. Yet, discourse relations like causality or contrast can also be signaled by other means than connectives, such as syntactic structures. So far, the influence of these alternative signals for discourse processing has been comparatively under-researched. In particular, their processing in a second language remains entirely unexplored. In a series of three self-paced reading experiments, we compare the reading patterns of contrastive relations by native French-speakers and non-native speakers of French with English as a first language. We focus on the effect of syntactic parallelism and how it interacts with different types of connectives. We test whether native and non-native readers equally recruit parallelism to process contrast in combination with or without a connective (Experiment 1), with a frequent vs. infrequent connective (Experiment 2) and with an ambiguous vs. unambiguous connective (Experiment 3), thus varying the explicitness and ease of retrieval of the contrast relation. Our results indicate that parallelism plays an important role for both groups of readers, but that it is a more prominent cue for non-native speakers, while its effect is modulated by task difficulty for native participants.
Highlights
Processing a text amounts to more than understanding the content of single sentences: it involves understanding the coherence links that connect sentences to each other and to the text as a whole
The results of Experiment 1 show that native speakers can process contrastive relations as with or without a connective, but that they benefit from parallelism
Non-native speakers do benefit from a connective, with a 100 ms difference between explicit and implicit trials. This facilitation of the connective in the L2 group seems to trump the effect of parallelism, which can only be observed in implicit relations, where participants compensate for the absence of a lexical instruction by using the information provided structurally
Summary
Processing a text amounts to more than understanding the content of single sentences: it involves understanding the coherence links that connect sentences to each other and to the text as a whole. These higher-level inferences correspond to discourse relations, a term used here to designate the mental representations of the connection between two (or more) propositions. Speakers and writers can use a connective to explicitly signal the intended coherence relations. The connective whereas signals a relation of contrast in Example (2)
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