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In discourse comprehension, if all goes well, people tend to create a rich and coherent mental representation of the events described in the text. To do so, referential and relational coherence must be established in order to construct a connected discourse. The objective of this follow-up eye-tracking study (N = 72) is to explore the existence of an interaction effect between two factors: (a) the extension of the referent (short and long antecedent), and (b) the semantic relation (counter-argumentativea pesar de, and causalpor), when processing the neuter pronounelloin texts written in Spanish. No previous study has systematically compared the on-line processing of texts in which different extensions of the encapsulated anaphoric antecedent by the neuter pronounello(‘this’ or ‘it’ in English) are presented in diverse marked semantic relations (causal and counter-argumentative). Based on three eye-tracking measures, we found distinctive patterns of reading behavior when anaphoric neuter reference and semantic relations must be processed conjointly in order to construct a coherent mental representation. The main findings show that reading longer and more complex antecedents encapsulated by the neutral pronounselloexerts more cognitive effort in late processing (Look Back measure), particularly when simultaneously and in the same discourse construction there is an explicitly marked counter-argumentative semantic relation. Implications for theories of referential and relational coherence are discussed.

Focus particles have been one of the spotlights of linguistic research during the last fifty years. They have been studied mainly from a syntactic and semantic perspective, in formal and functional approaches. However, in the last years new insights in this field have been developed through pragmatic and textual approaches. From that perspective, focus particles can be considered as a type of discourse particles, as far as their semantic nature and their pragmatic function are concerned. In this paper, we claim that experiments on text processing may help to support this view: by analyzing eye movements during reading and by testing the effective comprehension of utterances, we can demonstrate the key role of the Spanish scalar additive particle incluso ('even') in the process of information retrieval.