Referential Cohesion Research Articles

Key skills for science learning: the importance of text cohesion and reading ability

To explore the importance of text cohesion, we conducted two experiments. We measured online (reading times) and offline (comprehension accuracy) processes for texts that were high and low cohesion. In study one (n = 60), we manipulated referential cohesion using noun repetition (high cohesion) and synonymy (low cohesion). Students showed enhanced comprehension accuracy and faster comprehension responses for text that were high in referential cohesion. In study two (n = 52), we examined connective text designs (‘because’, ‘and’ and ‘no connective’). Students demonstrated enhanced reading times for text using a ‘because’ connective. Additionally, we examined the individual differences (reading ability, science self-concept and self-esteem) as predictors of achievement with science comprehension tasks. Across both experiments reading ability predicted comprehension with both high (noun-repetition text and ‘and’ text) and low cohesion text (synonym text and ‘no connective’ text). These findings highlight the importance of good reading abilities and text cohesion for promoting science comprehension and learning.

The Role of Task and Listener Characteristics in Second Language Listening

This study investigated the relationship between second language (L2) listening and a range of task and listener characteristics. More specifically, for a group of 93 nonnative English speakers, the researchers examined the extent to which linguistic complexity of the listening task input and response, and speed and explicitness of the input, were associated with task difficulty. In addition, the study explored the relationship between L2 listening and listeners’ working memory and listening anxiety. The participants responded to 30 multiple-choice listening items and took an English proficiency test. They also completed two working memory tasks and a listening anxiety questionnaire. The researchers analysed listening input and responses in terms of a variety of measures, using Cohmetrix, WebVocabProfiler, Praat, and the PHRASE list, in combination with expert analysis. Task difficulty and participant ability were determined by means of Rasch analysis, and correlational analyses were run to investigate the task and listener variables’ association with L2 listening. The study found that L2 listening task difficulty correlated significantly with indicators of phonological, discourse, and lexical complexity and with referential cohesion. Better L2 listening performances were delivered by less anxious listeners and, depending on L2 listening measure, by those with a higher working memory capacity.

Applying the Multilevel Framework of Discourse Comprehension To Evaluate the Text Characteristics of General Chemistry Textbooks

Prior chemistry education research has demonstrated a relationship between student reading skill and general chemistry course performance. In addition to student characteristics, however, the qualities of the learning materials with which students interact also impact student learning. For example, low-knowledge students benefit from texts that explicitly state relationships between ideas, namely, those that possess high cohesion. Such texts limit the number of inferences a student must draw: a practice crucial for students lacking the requisite prior knowledge to fill in conceptual gaps. In this study, five best-selling general chemistry texts were analyzed using Coh-Metrix, a tool created to measure the linguistic characteristics of discourse and text. Our results constitute a survey of five measures of text difficulty: narrativity, syntactic simplicity, word concreteness, referential cohesion, and deep cohesion. Statistically significant differences were found when comparing the cohesion of the chemistry texts. Therefore, some texts may be more optimal for low-knowledge students than the others. In addition, four of the five texts had an optimal distribution of cohesion. This work also demonstrates the utility of Coh-Metrix as a tool that instructors can use to assess the appropriateness of learning materials for students based on their reading skill and prior chemistry knowledge.

Keeping track of characters: Factors affecting referential adequacy in children’s narratives

This study considered the adequacy of references used by children to introduce, maintain, and reintroduce characters in complex narratives involving multiple characters. Sixty-three English-speaking Canadian children from kindergarten to second grade ( M age 7.0 years) told two multi-episode stories from wordless picture books. Analyses considered differences in referential adequacy both within-children and between grades. There was an unexpectedly large difference in adequacy levels across stories, mostly because of an overuse of pronouns in one story. Maintenance was the easiest referential function, whereas reintroduction proved more difficult than introduction only for the story with consistently lower adequacy levels. Participants across grades were affected by referential function and by story in analogous ways. The kindergartners did nonetheless obtain lower adequacy levels than the two higher grades due to a higher use of pronouns and because they were less able to clearly refer to characters even when they were using the same linguistic forms. Participants in the three grades successfully used a diversity of linguistic forms for their character references across referential functions. Together, these findings have important implications for referential cohesion in young school-aged children. First, they invite caution when drawing conclusions regarding developmental changes based on a single story. Second, they suggest that reintroduction may be particularly sensitive to story features that make referencing more demanding. Finally, they underscore the importance of considering reference within the broader textual context in order to produce a detailed account of referential abilities.

The development of narrative productivity, syntactic complexity, referential cohesion and event content in four- to eight-year-old Finnish children

This study focuses on the development of narrative structure and the relationship between narrative productivity and event content. A total of 172 Finnish children aged between four and eight participated. Their picture-elicited narrations were analysed for productivity, syntactic complexity, referential cohesion and event content. Each measure showed a developmental trend. Concerning consecutive age groups, significant differences were observed between four- and five-year-olds in productivity and event content and between five- and six-year-olds in referential cohesion. Multiple regression analysis showed that the relationship between productivity and event content was important, and especially the number of different word tokens proved to be useful in explaining the event content, whereas the number of communication units did not. This suggests that some productivity measures should be interpreted with caution.

The role of causality in discourse processing: Effects of expectation and coherence relations

Research on the processing of causality has shown that causally related sentences lead to faster reading, better recall, and better comprehension than sentences that are not causally related. In this study, we investigate two ways in which causality can influence processing: through the expectation that readers may have of a causal relation and the ease with which the sentences can be related in a causal way on the basis of their content. We ran two eye tracking experiments to investigate the online effects of these factors. In the experiments we looked at the influence of these factors on the process of establishing referential and relational coherence. Experiment 1 shows that immediate effects of causal relatedness on referential processing occur even with a connective that is not explicitly causal (when). Moreover, the results show that the early effect only occurs when readers expect a causal relation. Experiment 1 also shows that causal expectations facilitate the processing of causally related sentences. Experiment 2 shows that this is only the case when the content of the second clause actually allows a causal interpretation. The data show that causal expectations have differential effects on the processing of referential and relational coherence. Referential coherence is influenced proactively by the focusing of one of the referents in the context. Relational coherence, on the other hand, is influenced retroactively: only when there turns out to be a causal link between the sentences is processing facilitated by causal expectation.

Referential cohesion in isiZulu translated health texts

The aim of this study was to look into how isiZulu translators deal with the translation of English reference items in health texts. The researcher believes that this is a problem that needs attention since isiZulu is structurally different from English, and the use of reference cohesion is a crucial aspect in textuality. The researcher discovered that research done on this subject for the benefit of African languages in particular is scarce. The selected health texts were a sub-corpus of the health texts that the researcher collected between 2003 and 2006 for his doctoral studies, which he completed in 2009 (Ndlovu, 2009). In this article, the researcher focused on reference cohesion and reiteration (a component of lexical cohesion which complements reference cohesion). The researcher used, mainly, Barlow's ParaConc's software program to analyse the data, and the shorter selected texts were analysed manually. The researcher discovered that the translators translated the English pronouns with isiZulu subject and object concords. Examples are provided where English demonstrative pronouns were translated with their isiZulu equivalents, and there were examples were isiZulu nouns did not differentiate between the English articles ‘the’ and ‘a’. Instances were also found where demonstratives were used for the English definite ‘the’, and the translators seemed to show a degree of freedom in translating lexical cohesion.

What counts in grammatical number agreement?

Both notional and grammatical number affect agreement during language production. To explore their workings, we investigated how semantic integration, a type of conceptual relatedness, produces variations in agreement (Solomon & Pearlmutter, 2004). These agreement variations are open to competing notional and lexical–grammatical number accounts. The notional hypothesis is that changes in number agreement reflect differences in referential coherence: More coherence yields more singularity. The lexical–grammatical hypothesis is that changes in agreement arise from competition between nouns differing in grammatical number: More competition yields more plurality. These hypotheses make opposing predictions about semantic integration. On the notional hypothesis, semantic integration promotes singular agreement. On the lexical–grammatical hypothesis, semantic integration promotes plural agreement. We tested these hypotheses with agreement elicitation tasks in two experiments. Both experiments supported the notional hypothesis, with semantic integration creating faster and more frequent singular agreement. This implies that referential coherence mediates the effect of semantic integration on number agreement.

Influence of relational and referential coherence on the distribution of coordinated verb-second clauses in German and Dutch

This paper investigates, from the point of view of role and reference grammar, the formal and the functional side of SLF (‘subject gap in finite/frontal clauses’) coordination on the basis of a bidirectional parallel German-Dutch corpus. The main research question is how relational and referential coherence are mapped to the syntactic structure of SLF and coordination constructions alternating with it. A typology of the alternative constructions is proposed. Since both relational and referential coherence at the discourse level, as well as the nexus types at the syntax level, are composed of more or less prominent states of affairs, the paper defines a relative concept of prominence on both these grammar levels and examines whether and, if so, how this concept influences the mapping between discursive and syntactic structure. In particular, it looks at absolute and relative frequencies so as to find potential trends in this mapping. There is a tendency that the more prominent the discursive states of affairs are, the more syntactically prominent the chosen coordination alternative is. The states of affairs linked by the interclausal coherence relation seem to affect the distribution of the coordination alternatives both in German and in Dutch. The state of affairs expressed by the information-structural status of the first subject seems to affect at least the distribution of two types. To a certain extent, both German and Dutch strive to iconically map discursive to syntactic prominence.

Poster #32 THE NEURAL BASES OF REVERSAL LEARNING DEFICITS IN UNMEDICATED SCHIZOPHRENIA PATIENTS

This paper is aimed at studying any differences arising from texts that supposedly have the same field and tenor but differ in mode. The texts in question are excerpts from F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby and from the script of a film adapted from the book. By analyzing various aspects of the realization of semantic components in terms of referential cohesion, theme, lexical cohesion, conjuction and mood, the author suggests that differences in field and personal tenor can be observed as a result of differences in mode, the extent of which depends on the range of the last. Theoretical elucidation is attempted in the light of both Halliday's and Martin's insights. Firstly, all the functional components are interlocked one way or another. Any possible changes due to the textual function will inevitably lead to adjustments in the rest of the functional components. Secondly, field, personal tenor and mode are constrained by a high level of semiotics, i.e., the functional tenor.

The use of cohesive markers in narratives by children with Williams syndrome

ABSTRACTThis study examined how children and adolescents with Williams syndrome (WS; ages 8 years, 0 months [8;0]–14;5) used referential devices (determiners and pronouns), tense, and connectives to create cohesion in oral narratives based on a storybook compared to typically developing mentally and chronologically age-matched children. WS children used cohesive devices in narratives similarly to mentally matched children, but their performance differed from the chronologically matched children only for referential cohesion. WS children's grammatical error rates were similar to both the mentally and chronologically matched children. Implications for the characterization of the language profile of individuals with WS and considerations for the focus of future narrative research are discussed.

Thought Disorder and Communication Deviance as Predictors of Outcome in Youth at Clinical High Risk for Psychosis

Given the fundamental role of thought disorder in schizophrenia, subtle communication disturbance may be a valuable predictor of subsequent development of psychosis. Here we examined the contribution of thought and communication disturbance to the prediction of outcome in adolescents identified as putatively prodromal for psychosis. Transcribed speech samples were elicited from 105 adolescents (54 identified as being at clinical high risk for a first episode of psychosis [CHR], and 51 demographically comparable comparison subjects) and coded for formal thought disorder (FTD) and linguistic cohesion. We then examined the association of baseline FTD/cohesion with conversion to psychosis and social and role outcome at follow-up, approximately 1 year later. At baseline, CHR patients who subsequently converted to psychosis (CHR+) showed an elevated rate of illogical thinking and poverty of content (POC) in their speech, relative to both typically developing controls and CHR patients who did not convert to psychosis (CHR-). CHR+ youth also used significantly less referential cohesion at baseline, indicating that they provide fewer references to persons, objects, or events mentioned in preceding utterances. Multiple regression models indicated that, among measures of FTD/cohesion, illogical thinking was uniquely predictive of subsequent conversion to psychosis, whereas POC and referential cohesion were significant predictors of social and role functioning, respectively. Despite the absence of fully psychotic symptoms, putatively prodromal individuals evidence signs of communication disturbance that are qualitatively similar to those seen in schizophrenia and are predictive of both conversion to psychosis and psychosocial outcome. These findings suggest that FTD measures have prognostic significance for at-risk youth.

Coh-Metrix

Computer analyses of text characteristics are often used by reading teachers, researchers, and policy makers when selecting texts for students. The authors of this article identify components of language, discourse, and cognition that underlie traditional automated metrics of text difficulty and their new Coh-Metrix system. Coh-Metrix analyzes texts on multiple measures of language and discourse that are aligned with multilevel theoretical frameworks of comprehension. The authors discuss five major factors that account for most of the variance in texts across grade levels and text categories: word concreteness, syntactic simplicity, referential cohesion, causal cohesion, and narrativity. They consider the importance of both quantitative and qualitative characteristics of texts for assigning the right text to the right student at the right time.

A computer’s understanding of literature

Everyone agrees that a computer could never understand and appreciate literature, but the fields of computational linguistics and discourse processing have made important advances in automatic detection of language and discourse characteristics. We have analyzed literary texts and political speeches with two computer tools, namely Coh-Metrix and Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC). Coh-Metrix provides hundreds of measures that funnel into 5 principal components: word concreteness, syntactic simplicity, referential cohesion, deep cohesion, and narrativity. LIWC classifies words on 80 categories, such as first person pronouns, negative emotions, and social words. This paper illustrates how computer tools can unveil new insights about literature and can empirically test claims by literary scholars and social scientists. Our approach offers a computational science of literature.

Beyond Single Readability Measures: Using Multiple Sources of Information in Establishing Text Complexity

A focus of the Common Core State Standards/English Language Arts (CCSS/ELA) is that students become increasingly more capable with complex text over their school careers. This focus has redirected attention to the measurement of text complexity. While suggesting multiple criteria for this task, the CCSS/ELA offers a single measure of text complexity—Lexiles. Additional quantitative data are available—including the two components of a Lexile rating—that can provide more comprehensive views of text complexity. The two “intra-lexile” measures and two others (referential cohesion and an index of words in a text that are predicted to be “hard.”) are applied to sets of exemplars for grade bands 2–3 and 4–5 within the CCSS/ELA. These analyses suggest that conclusions about text complexity vary considerably when multiple quantitative measures, rather than a single, omnibus index, are used.

Linguistic correlates of self in deceptive oral autobiographical narratives

The current study collected orally-delivered autobiographical narratives from a sample of 44 undergraduate students. Participants were asked to produce both deceptive and non-deceptive versions of their narrative to two specific autobiographical question prompts while standing in front of a video camera. Narratives were then analyzed with Coh-Metrix software on 33 indices of linguistic cohesion. Following a Bonferroni correction for the large number of linguistic variables (p<.002), results indicated that the deceptive narratives contained more explicit action verbs, less linguistic complexity, and less referential coherence (sentences being cohesive with each other). The results support a theory that, in deceptive narratives, there is greater narrative distance between the self that narrates and the self that is narrated about. This suggests that narrative selves are constituted not as autonomous selves, but are subject to processes (e.g., psychological, linguistic, social) that are likely operating on a subconscious level.

The Bora connector pronoun and tail-head linkage: a study in language-specific grammaticalization

The Amazonian language Bora systematically uses in narratives a special, paragraph-initial anaphoric pronoun. This pronoun helps to ensure referential coherence through agreement in noun class and number with an antecedent, whose referent is thematic in the new paragraph. Additional morphology in the connector pronoun specifies temporal, causal, and other relations between events. The connector pronoun is syntactically tightly integrated into the clause, where it may function as an argument of a verb or as the dependent element of a genitive phrase. Certain frequent forms of the connector pronoun are the basis for a number of lexicalized conjunctions. This paragraph-linking strategy parallels in a number of ways tail-head linkage systems, not only in its functionality, but also with respect to its diachronic outcome (discourse conjunctions). The fact that Bora grammaticalized nominal expressions in a paragraph-linking system (whereas verbs are the central components of tail-head linkage) is congruent with the general preference of Bora to use many noun phrases per clause, in contrast to tail-head linkage languages, where noun phrases are rarely used.

From Contrastive Text Linguistics to Didactic Applications – and back again

Abstract: Results from contrastive text linguistics are used to show how systematic differences between an L1 and an L2 can be applied to foreign language didactics for teaching textual skills in a methodical and efficient way. The language pair studied consists of Danish and French, which, belonging to two different language families, Germanic and Romance languages respectively, show many systematic differences in their fundamental structure – within lexicalisation, morphology, and syntax – that turn out to have a predictable impact on text structure. Thus, differences are found between Danish and French texts at the levels of referential coherence in different types of anaphoric expressions, of temporal coherence in different means for fore- and back-grounding events, and of structural coherence in different effects of framing via pre-posed adverbials, etc. Two e-learning programs, TeXtRay and NaviLire, are presented, which exploit such systematic differences between given language pairs in offering different types of navigation and visualisation exercises aimed at teaching textual skills needed at higher university education, such as reading and writing complex academic or specialised texts in a foreign language.

Compétences narratives et communicatives chez des personnes en situation d’illettrisme

The purpose of the article is the study of the nature and extent of oral language difficulties suffered by those people who are in a situation of functional illiteracy, in relation to their reading abilities. We are aiming at providing a systematic analysis of narrations delivered by an extensive sample of illiterate adults, in a standardized narration task considered as a communication situation, implementing at the same time lexicosyntaxic rules on the one hand and pragmatic skills of producing linguistic forms in relation to a given context, intentions and mutual expectations, on the other. Fifty-two illiterate men and women, along with a control group comparable with regards to age, sex and socioprofessional environment, delivered a narration from a sequence of pictures casting three protagonists of the same gender for an absent receiver. All narrations were integrally transcripted and coded using two sets of measurements: (1) structural ones (lexical diversity, morphologic errors, syntax complexity) and (2) pragmatic ones (evaluative expressions, canonic scheme, referential cohesion). Results show a sizeable deficit of the illiterates with regards to the structural level (mainly the morphosyntax), with a large variability between subjects at the pragmatic level. Furthermore, the correlations show some relationships between the narrative skills and reading abilities, mainly at the morphosyntaxic level. These results are discussed in terms of reciprocal causality between the written and oral languages and for their implications in the education of adults in written language.

A comparison of the linguistic and interactional features of language learning websites and textbooks1

Self-study is playing an increasingly important role in the learning and instruction of many subjects, including second and foreign languages. With the rapid development of the internet, language websites for self-study are flourishing. While the language of print-based teaching materials has received some attention, the linguistic and interactional features of websites are largely ignored by educationists, and online learning materials are regarded as simply duplicates of their print-based counterparts. This is far from satisfactory because web-based and print-based materials are very different tools with which participants negotiate their learning activities. This paper examines the linguistic and interactional features of English learning websites in terms of (1) their lexical density/clause length; (2) referential cohesion, particularly the use of personal pronouns; and (3) the presence of involvement strategies and other interactional features. These features are compared with those in textbooks to examine how websites deviate from traditional instructional texts. It is found that both clause and lexical density are greater on websites than in traditional textbooks. Websites make more use of the personal pronouns ‘I’ and ‘you’, whereas textbooks make more use of the authoritative ‘we’. Websites are also more interactional in terms of their use of involvement strategies, imperative structures and modals. These findings highlight the different contexts of textbooks and websites, particularly the different nature of the two channels and their credibility as information sources. This has practical implications for the design of appropriate online instructional resources.