Referential Cohesion Research Articles

Causal Relations and Cohesive Strategies in the Narratives of Heritage Speakers of Russian in Their Two Languages

Causal relations allow a very detailed insight into the narrative skills of children from various backgrounds; however, their contribution has not been sufficiently studied in bilingual populations. The present study examines the expression of causal relations and the linguistic forms used to encode them in narratives of bilingual children speaking Russian as the Heritage Language (HL) and Hebrew as the Societal Language (SL). Narratives were collected from 21 typically developing Russian–Hebrew bilingual children using the Frog story picture book and were coded for frequency and type of episodic components, and for causal relations focusing on enabling and motivational relations. Results showed that the number of episodic components was higher in Hebrew than in Russian. An in-depth analysis showed that more components were mentioned in the first five episodes, particularly at the onset of the story. Causal relations were similar in both languages but were differently distributed across the languages—more enabling relations in Russian stories and more motivational relations in Hebrew stories. Production of episodic components and causal relations was affected by language proficiency but not by age of onset of bilingualism (AoB). In terms of language forms, lexical chains (e.g., search~find) were the most frequent means for inferring relations. Syntactic and referential cohesion were used in dedicated episodes to convey relations in both languages. Finally, a higher number of significant correlations between narrative productivity measures, episodic components, and causal relations were found in SL/Hebrew than in HL/Russian. The study results underscore the need to understand how language-specific abilities interact with knowledge of narrative discourse construction.

Coh-Metrix 시스템을 통한 고등학교 영어 모의시험 독해지문의 학년 내 연계성 분석

This corpus-driven research aims to examine the intra-grade continuity of reading passages within high school English mock exams, specifically the national academic achievement tests for seniors in 2023. These tests were conducted quarterly by four regional educational offices: Seoul in March, Incheon in April, Gyeonggi Province in July, and Seoul in October. A corpus of 100 reading passages, 25 from each test, was analyzed via a range of Coh-Metrix measures, including word features, lexical diversity, connectives, readability, referential cohesion, syntactic complexity, semantic cohesion, and so on. These Coh-metrix results demonstrated that there was no compelling evidence to support strong intra-grade continuity, highlighting the necessity for meticulous calibration of text difficulty, which should incrementally escalate with successive test administrations. The analysis of basic metrics, lexical frequency and diversity, syntactic complexity, and readability revealed no consistent trends across test administrations. Additionally, lexical attributes such as concreteness, familiarity, imagery, and age of acquisition did not show significant continuity. Moreover, the analysis of syntactic complexity also showed no consistent pattern. The current inconsistency in text difficulty suggests that students may not be receiving the progressive challenge needed to develop their reading comprehension skills effectively. Drawing upon these findings, theoretical and pedagogical implications are elucidated.

한국어능력시험(TOPIK) 읽기 영역 텍스트의 난이도 분석

The Test of Proficiency in Korean (TOPIK) stands as a reputable examination capable of assessing Korean language proficiency for various purposes. In order for TOPIK, with its pivotal significance, to be effectively utilized for multifaceted objectives, the validity and reliability of its evaluations must be substantiated. Thus, this study aims to scrutinize the disparities between TOPIK I and TOPIK II, focusing on reading texts, across various factors. Initially, a corpus was constructed comprising reading texts from the 35th session (post-2014 revision) to the most recent 83rd session available as of March 2014, obtained from the TOPIK website's archive. Subsequently, utilizing the Data Evaluation Unified System (DEUS), linguistic indicators including surface features (vocabulary and sentence length), lexical factors (vocabulary frequency, diversity, pronoun usage, emotional vocabulary usage), syntactic factors (proportion of function words, sentence constituent ratio), and discursive factors (referential coherence, patterns of adverbial conjunction usage) were employed to compare the text difficulty. Additionally, recommendations for future test construction were proposed based on the outcomes derived from each factor analysis.

The Use of Particles in Ngapak Bumiayu Language: A Study of Systemic Functional Linguistics

This study explores the use of particles in Ngapak Bumiayu, a Javanese dialect spoken in Bumiayu, Brebes, Central Java, using Michael A.K. Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics theory. Data was collected from everyday conversations of native speakers using a descriptive analysis method. The identified particles—kok, lho, kok ya, toh, wis, and bar—each have unique roles in sentence structure and meaning. The ideational metafunction shows that these particles enrich the information in sentences. Without particles, sentences present straightforward facts, but with particles, they carry additional nuances that enhance the message. For the interpersonal metafunction, particle placement affects meaning. Kok can be in any sentence position, conveying surprise or emphasis. Lho emphasizes attention. Kok ya, typically at the beginning or middle, shows wonder and affirmation. Toh, usually at the end, indicates finality. Wis, in the middle or end, signifies completion or agreement. Bar indicates ongoing or recent actions. The textual metafunction highlights particles' role in maintaining text coherence and cohesion. They ensure consistency and continuity in discourse through repetition, serving as connectors (referential cohesion), and maintaining consistent meanings across contexts (lexical cohesion). These particles are essential for structuring and organizing information in sentences and conversations. These findings illustrate the significant role of particles in enhancing communication, structuring information, and providing nuanced meanings in the Ngapak Bumiayu language.

Mode of production and (referential) cohesion: An L2 English corpus-based study of syntactic coordination

This study investigates mode of production effects on narrative discourse configuration and referring expression (RE) selection in contexts of reference maintenance in syntactic coordination. It looks at 3rd person singular grammatical subjects across intermediate and advanced L1 Spanish-L2 English, in contrast with L1 English. The data are written and spoken narratives from the COREFL corpus produced by the same participant and under the same task conditions. The study reveals an effect of the mode of production in L2 English (referential) cohesion, while no such an effect has been found in L1 English performance. In general, in L2 English deficits in spoken production seem to persist while those in written production disappear by advanced level. In particular, referential cohesion seems more challenging for L2 English learners than the discourse-syntactic configuration of their narrative texts. By advanced level, the learner's discourse configuration is comparable to that of native speakers' both in their written and in their spoken narratives. However, the spoken productions by advanced learners still show a higher amount of fuller REs, in comparison to the spoken productions by the native participants.

Referential Cohesion, Ambiguity, Vagueness and Generality in Parliamentary Debate*

AbstractPolitical discourse has been characterised as being ‘vague’ and ‘ambiguous’. It is argued that politicians tend to use generic and unspecific words in order to avoid explicit commitment (McGee 2018). Although this situation may describe discourse genres such as political interviews and election debates, it is unclear that it can be applied to parliamentary debate. This study analyses a corpus consisting of two parliamentary debates in English and Catalan with respect to ambiguity, vagueness and generality in connection to referential cohesion. Three variables are qualitatively and quantitatively analysed: a) the abstractness of the topics, b) the non‐specific or specific nature of these entities, and c) the grammatical or lexical nature of the units that maintain referential cohesion. The results show that ambiguity and vagueness are rather infrequent in parliamentary debate. However, the high frequencies of non‐concrete referential entities, and of non‐specific referents characterise parliamentary debate as a general discourse. As a counterpart, lexical cohesion devices as repetition and encapsulation highlight the topics under discussion, what leads to avoid ambiguity and vagueness.

Detecting Financial Statement Fraud through Multidimensional Analysis of Text Readability

ABSTRACT This study uses Coh-Metrix to analyze multiple dimensions of readability of the MD&A section of the SEC Form 10-K. We incorporate the five main Coh-Metrix components of text easability (word concreteness, syntactic simplicity, referential cohesion, deep cohesion, and narrativity) into a logistic model to test their predictive power for financial misreporting. We find that compared to the MD&As of nonfraud firms, the MD&As of fraud firms connect clauses and sentences less coherently, use more story-like language, and show a higher number of vague and abstract words. Thus, referential cohesion, narrativity, and word concreteness significantly enhance predictive ability in fraud detection. The Coh-Metrix readability measures enhance the linguistic complexity assessment beyond traditional readability measures, such as the Fog Index and the Flesch Indexes. Financial analysts and investors can utilize the Coh-Metrix readability measures to supplement traditional readability measures and common financial statement variables in predicting financial misreporting. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text. JEL Classifications: G32; K42; M41; M48.

The Influence of Passage Cohesion on Cloze Test Item Difficulty

The role of context in cloze tests has long been seen as both a benefit as well as a complication in their usefulness as a measure of second language comprehension (Brown, 2013). Passage cohesion, in particular, would seem to have a relevant and important effect on the degree to which cloze items function and the interpretability of performances (Brown, 1983; Dastjerdi & Talebinezhad, 2006; Oller & Jonz, 1994). With recent evidence showing that cloze items can require examinees to access information at both the sentence and passage level (Trace, 2020), it’s worthwhile to now look back and examine the relationship between aspects of passage cohesion—referential cohesion, semantic overlap, and incidence of conjunctives—and item difficulty by classification. The current study draws upon a large pool of cloze test passages and items (k = 377) originally used by Brown (1993) along with automated text analysis of cohesion (Coh-Metrix, McNamara et al., 2014) to examine the impact of passage cohesion on item function. Correlations, factor analysis, and linear regression point to clear though minimal differences for both sentential and intersentential items as they relate to aspects of passage cohesion, the results of which may inform future test design and interpretation of cloze performance.

The Changes in Text Cohesion of Senior High School Students Measured by Coh‐Metrix as a Function of Grade Level

National English Curriculum Standards for General High School sets requirements for text cohesion and text cohesion is an essential component of English writing and English writing evaluation. However, previous studies explored text cohesion mainly from perspectives of college students, horizontal comparison and traditional tools. In this study, a corpus of 300 essays by grade level (senior one and senior three) are analyzed computationally by Coh‐Metrix to examine whether text cohesion improves as grade level rises. During the specific process, this paper aims to identify characteristics and discriminate differences between the text cohesion created by the two grades. The main instrument is Coh‐Metrix—a type of computational tool that offers over 200 measurements to quantify texts. This study mainly employs the measures under the category of referential cohesion, LSA and connectives of it to assess text cohesion. The results demonstrate that as the grade level increases, text cohesion gets better. Specifically, these students produce more noun overlap of adjacent sentences, argument overlap of adjacent sentences, noun overlap of all sentences, argument overlap of all sentences, stem overlap of all sentences, LSA overlap of adjacent sentences, LSA overlap of adjacent paragraphs, LSA overlap of given/new sentences all connectives and additive connectives.

Comparative Analysis of the Readability of English Research Articles Written by Chinese and English Native Writers

This research tries to explore the linguistic factors affecting the citation rate of Chinese writer’s research articles. We selected 50 SCI journal article introductions written by English Native and Chinese writers respectively. We measured their readability using Coh-Metrix. We then analyzed the data based on Graesser & McNamara’s theory of multi-level discourse comprehension. Our results show that the introductions written by the two types of writers differ significantly at the following levels: (1) at the discourse level, the referential cohesion score of the Chinese writer’s introductions was higher than that of the native speaker’s, indicating a higher readability; (2) at the situation model level, the deep cohesion and time sequential scores of the native writer’s introductions were higher than those of the Chinese writer’s, suggesting higher readability. Our findings also imply that although some readability indices of Chinese writers’ introductions are higher than those of the native writer’s, it does not necessarily indicate high readability literally, nor good writing quality, which could also be an explanation for the low citation rate. Moreover, the results show that the readability parameters of Chinese and native writer’s introductions differ at various levels, so it is hard to conclude that the readability alone impacts the citation rate.

Chinese intermediate English learners outdid ChatGPT in deep cohesion: Evidence from English narrative writing

ChatGPT is a publicly available chatbot that can quickly generate texts on given topics, but it remains unknown whether the chatbot is as good as or even superior to human writers in all aspects of writing, and whether the chatbot's writing quality can be significantly improved by updating commands. To investigate these issues, this study compared writing performance on a narrative topic by ChatGPT and Chinese intermediate English (CIE) learners so as to reveal the chatbot's advantages and disadvantages in writing.The data were analyzed by virtue of the five discourse components using Coh-Metrix (a special instrument for analyzing language discourse), and the results revealed that ChatGPT performed better than human writers in narrativity, word concreteness, and referential cohesion, but worse in syntactic simplicity and deep cohesion in its initial version. After its commands were updated, the resulting version was better in its syntactic simplicity, but it still lagged far behind the CIE learners’ writing in deep cohesion. In addition, a correlation analysis of the discourse components suggests that narrativity was correlated with referential cohesion for both ChatGPT and the human writers, but the correlations varied within each group.

Referential Cohesion in Cumcumename

Çağdaş metin dil bilimi çalışmaları doğrultusunda “anlamsal/yapısal bütünlük taşıyan ve bir iletisi olan sözler birlikteliği” olarak tanımlanabilecek olan metin kavramının önemi artmıştır. Gerek metin olanla olmayanı ayırt etmede gerekse yeni metin oluşturmada metinsellik ölçütlerine uyulup uyulmadığının belirlenmesi gerekir. Temelde bağlaşıklık ve tutarlılık olarak iki ana başlıkta ele alınan metinsellik ölçütleri; sözlü, yazılı veya görsel malzemenin metin niteliği taşıyıp taşımadığının tespitinde önemlidir. Özellikle tarihî Türk lehçelerine ait eserlerde, işlenen konuların farklı coğrafyalarda kimi zaman bazı farklılıklarla yer alması ve çağlarını aşması eser kurgularının metinsellik ölçütlerini karşıladığını göstermektedir. Çalışmanın konusunu teşkil eden Harezm Türkçesi eseri Cümcümenâme; Anadolu ve Çağatay sahalarında da nüshaları bulunan manzum bir mesnevidir. Çok bilinen bir halk hikayesiyle de (Kesikbaş Destanı) konu bakımından benzerlik göstermektedir. Eserin metinsellik ölçütlerini karşılıyor olması ve kurgusal yapısı; içeriğin yayılmasını kolaylaştırmış, sözlü geleneğe de katkı sunmuştur. Çalışmada eser, metinsellik ölçütlerinden gönderimsel bağlaşıklık açısından incelenecek ve gönderimsel bağlaşıklığı sağlamada yararlanılan sözcük türleri; öncül/bağımsız, ardıl/bağımlı olma niteliklerine göre dış ve iç gönderim (eş gönderim/art gönderim/ ön gönderim) açısından ele alınacaktır. Böylelikle bağlaşıklık ölçütünün eserin akıcılığına etkisi belirlenmeye çalışılacaktır.

Text Complexity of Chinese Elementary School Textbooks: Analysis of Text Linguistic Features Using Machine Learning Algorithms

ABSTRACT Purpose This study sought to 1) identify linguistic features important for Chinese text complexity with a theory-based and systematic approach, and 2) address how feature sets and algorithms affect the performance of Chinese text complexity models. Method Texts from Chinese language arts textbooks from Grades 1 to 6 (N = 1,478) in Mainland China were analyzed. The predictor variables were 265 linguistic features of texts: 154 lexical features and 111 sentence and discourse features. The outcome variable was the complexity level of texts; a one-semester-scale was applied, thus 12 levels in total (two semesters per grade). Results Features of the categories of character and word frequency, character and word semantic features, lexical diversity, part-of-speech syntactic categories, and referential cohesion were found the most important. With the important features identified, we found that text complexity models with features at all levels outperformed those with features at only one level. Models using the two machine learning algorithms (Random Forest Regression and Support Vector Regression) outperformed those using Linear Regression. Conclusion This work clarifies important linguistic features for Chinese text complexity, and points to the necessity of considering features across levels and using machine learning algorithms in future text complexity research.

Cohesion Profiles of L2 Writings by Korean EFL College Learners

This study is to explore the cohesion profiles of L2 writings both quantitatively and qualitatively in the course of process writing by L2 English learners to see if learners exhibit any progress in subsequent drafts. Three students’ writing samples were collected from a course of Logic and Essay Writing offered at a university in Jeollanam-do in Korea. Their three subsequent drafts of English learning autobiographies in the course of recursive process writing were analyzed both quantitatively using Coh-Metrix and qualitatively based on Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) taxonomy of cohesive devices. Coh-Metrix indices relevant to cohesion including descriptive indices, referential cohesion indices, and connective indices of three learners‘ writing samples were examined. In addition to the quantitative analysis between three writings and between the three drafts, qualitatively divergent patterns in the use of respective cohesive devices were discussed.

A Comparison of Linguistic Aspects in 2015-2019 NAEA English Listening Texts Between School Levels and Between Language Forms

The current study aims to investigate English listening texts of the National Assessment of Educational Achievement (NAEA) at word, sentence, and text levels. It classifies NAEA listening texts into two school levels (middle school and high school) and two forms of spoken language (dialogues and monologues). It is necessary to examine changes of linguistic aspects in the NAEA for both middle and high school students to figure out whether text difficulty systematically rises as school level increases. The corpus for this study includes 169 listening texts from five academic years from 2015 to 2019. In this period, tests were implemented as paper-based tests. Two research questions are about linguistic differences of NAEA listening texts between middle school and high school and between dialogues and monologues at word, sentence and text levels. Coh-Metrix analyzed descriptive measures related to words, lexical diversity, and word information for word-level analysis, descriptive measures related to sentences and syntactic complexity for sentence-level analysis, and readability and referential cohesion for text-level analysis. Results and educational implications could increase the quality of NAEA listening texts.

An Investigation of Lexical Cohesion in Kurdish EFL Students Emails

Cohesion, the most important principle and criterion of textuality, is theconnection or the connectedness manifested when the interpretation of onetextual element, i.e., a word located in one sentence is dependent onanother element in the text.
 Cohesion is thus one of the text properties that contribute to theorganization of discourse. Coherence has to be clearly distinguished fromcohesion. Hence, cohesion refers to the overt semantic relations in the text,whereas coherence refers to semantic and pragmatic relations between theparts of the text.
 The three main categories of cohesion are referential cohesion(anaphoric chains), relational cohesion (connectives and ellipsis) andlexical cohesion. Lexical cohesion, which is the focus of this researchpaper, contributes to the ideational (semantic) structuring of discourse. Itrefers to the semantic relations between the lexical items in the text; thus itprovides information about the way lexemes are organized in the discourse.
 Lexical cohesion is the dependency relationship between wordsbased on associative relations in common knowledge. Lexical coherenceplays a dominant role in text structure. However, the lack of cohesion inwriting is a problem that plagues many EFL students. The present papergoal is to help students to overcome this problem in which it has been achallenge to EFL teachers and researchers alike. Thus, the present researchpaper aims at analyzing Kurdish EFL students' emails for the purpose offinding out their tendency towards using lexical cohesion devices, i.e., theextent to which they use or avoid using these d

How do cohesion features inform science instruction for English learners?: A comparison study of digital and printed science texts

ABSTRACT Cohesion plays an important role in science texts as their comprehension depends much on structural and textual signalling, which demonstrates the organisation of the text, the logical links of ideas, and the intended purpose of the writer. Particularly, research has shown that English learners (ELs) rely more on cohesive markers than their English-speaking peers during the reading process. To promote students’ reading comprehension in science, understanding how cohesion features are used to construct texts and providing pertinent instructions are important for practitioners. This study investigated a series of cohesion features commonly adopted in middle school science texts in the U.S. – in digital and printed texts respectively, through Coh-Metrix – and compared their frequency using Hotelling’s T-Squared test. This study is one of the pioneer studies that incorporated digital texts for cohesion analysis. Inclusion of the digital texts is meaningful as the pandemic facilitated technology uses in the U.S public school and elsewhere. Results showed that (1) commonly used cohesion features included additive connectives, 2nd person pronouns, and local referential cohesion, and (2) compared with the printed version of science texts, the digital version presented higher cohesion as indicated by index scores. The instructional implications for practitioners are discussed.

Multidimensional interaction of L2 writing fluency and cohesion: A complexity theory perspective

Applying a view of L2 writing development from the perspective of complexity theory, this study explores the multidimensionality of L2 writing fluency and cohesion, examines the interaction of their internal dimensions and confirms four types of writing fluency and cohesion development patterns. 14 tasks in one academic year producing 910 essays by 65 learners from southern Africa were collected as the corpus. Factor analysis is used to investigate L2 writing fluency and the cohesion dimension. Non-parametric correlation analysis, LOESS curve and change point analysis are conducted to analyse the multidimensional interactive patterns. Results show the following: 1) L2 writing fluency and cohesion involve five indicators in the three subdimensions of referential cohesion, connective and unit length; 2) the development of writing fluency weakly supports the cohesion development of noun overlap and connective indices, but weakly competes against the development of latent semantics. Dimensions of conjunction and lexical word overlap develop mutually in coordination; and 3) four interaction patterns of L2 writing fluency and cohesion were identified, namely an unstable type, a coordinative type, a competitive type and a coordinative- competitive type. These findings show significant differences in individual and group statistical features, which expand the scope of interpretation of the complexity theory.

The Relationship between Text Formality and Writing Quality: An Evaluation Based on Coh-Metrix

This study seeks to investigate the relationship between text formality and writing quality by quantifying text formality in EFL English writing. In order to conduct the research, 548 English argumentation compositions were evaluated in terms of the five Coh-Metrix text formality dimensions: narrativity, syntactic simplicity, word concreteness, referential coherence, and deep cohesion. Based on the study, there is only a weak relationship between text formality and writing quality, and some facets of text formality, such as narrativity, word concreteness, syntactic simplicity, and deep cohesion, have varying degrees of influence on writing quality and, consequently, on English writing scores. As per statistics, narrativity has a detrimental effect on writing quality; word concreteness has a significant positive correlation with writing quality; syntactic simplicity shows a relatively small negative correlation with writing quality; deep cohesion has a modestly negative correlation with writing quality; and referential coherence has no correlation with writing quality. It is intended that the findings of this study will have some bearing on how English argumentative writing is taught and learned.

The Relationship between Text Formality and Writing Quality: An Evaluation Based on Coh-Metrix

This study seeks to investigate the relationship between text formality and writing quality by quantifying text formality in EFL English writing. In order to conduct the research, 548 English argumentation compositions were evaluated in terms of the five Coh-Metrix text formality dimensions: narrativity, syntactic simplicity, word concreteness, referential coherence, and deep cohesion. Based on the study, there is only a weak relationship between text formality and writing quality, and some facets of text formality, such as narrativity, word concreteness, syntactic simplicity, and deep cohesion, have varying degrees of influence on writing quality and, consequently, on English writing scores. As per statistics, narrativity has a detrimental effect on writing quality; word concreteness has a significant positive correlation with writing quality; syntactic simplicity shows a relatively small negative correlation with writing quality; deep cohesion has a modestly negative correlation with writing quality; and referential coherence has no correlation with writing quality. It is intended that the findings of this study will have some bearing on how English argumentative writing is taught and learned.