Compensating for processing difficulty in discourse

Effect of parallelism in contrastive relations

Datos Bibliográficos

ID11273247
AutoresLudivine Crible (0000-0001-6300-2765, University of Edinburgh, autor de correspondencia), Martin J Pickering (0000-0002-2005-049X, University of Edinburgh)
Año2020
Volumen57
Número10
Páginas862-879
Fecha de publicación2020-11-25
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaDiscourse Processes (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0163-853X • E-ISSN: 1532-6950
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/0163853x.2020.1813493
OpenAlexW3084362071
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas10
Referencias citadas52

This study aims to establish whether the processing of different connectives (e.g., and, but) and different coherence relations (addition, contrast) can be modulated by a structural feature of the connected segments—namely, parallelism. While but is mainly used to contrast two expressions, and occurs in many different relations and has been shown to come with a processing cost. We report three self-paced reading experiments in which we manipulate whether the connected segments share a common verb phrase. Such parallel constructions frequently occur in contrastive relations, although they are typically treated as additive in comprehension research. We expect that parallelism will compensate for the cognitive complexity of contrast and for the ambiguity of and by further signaling the coherence relation. Our results indicate that parallelism speeds up processing and provides further evidence for priming in comprehension. However, parallelism interacted with connective ambiguity in an overt disambiguation task (Experiment 3) but not in a more natural reading task (Experiment 2). We argue that the processing of contrast remains shallow unless disambiguation is explicitly required

Ambiguity · Cognition · Cognitive psychology · Coherence (philosophical gambling strategy · Comprehension · Contrast (vision · Linguistics · Natural language processing · Parallelism (grammar · Phrase · Priming (agriculture · Reading (process · Sentence · Sentence processing · Task (project management · Verb · Computer Science · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Mathematics · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism · Psychology · Reading and Literacy Development · Artificial Intelligence