Processing spoken discourse: Effects of position and emphasis on judgments of textual coherence∗

Abstract

Three experiments explored the proposal that methods of marking new information serve a topic‐promotion function during the processing of spoken discourse. Two devices commonly discussed as important for determining information structure—intonational emphasis and sentence position—were manipulated factorially. Subjects made coherence judgments for active sentence pairs in which the topic of Sentence 2 was congruent with either the subject or object of Sentence 1. A consistent judgment time advantage was found for object‐relevant continuations but effects of emphasis were restricted to the object position in the first experiment and were not obtained in subsequent experiments. The object advantage was shown to depend on the intersentence delay, thus implicating a new‐information‐last principle as an important means of maintaining local cohesion and facilitating the listener's task of integrating spoken discourse.