The Influence of Connectives on Sentence Comprehension

Abstract

The results of four experiments indicate that the presence of a connective like because increases the activation level of the first clause when placed between two clauses of a sentence. Immediately after reading two clauses that were either linked or not linked by a connective, subjects judged whether a probe word had been mentioned in one of the clauses. The recognition probe times to the verb from the first statement were consistently faster when a connective had conjoined the statements than when the statements constituted two separate sentences. Experiment 2 indicated that the reactivation of the first clause occurred at the end of the second statement but not at the beginning of the second statement. The results of Experiment 3 revealed that the reactivation effect occurred for related statement pairs but not for unrelated statement pairs. Experiment 4 showed that the reactivation effect also generalized to the connective although. In all of the experiments, the presence of a connective tended to decrease statement 2 reading times while increasing sentence wrap-up times and also led to faster and more accurate responses to comprehension questions, thus indicating increased integrative processing. The data supported a Reactivation Hypothesis that states that connectives evoke inter-clause integration and the reactivation of the first clause, and that these processes occur at the end of the second clause.