Lexical and Structural Cues to Discourse Processing in First and Second Language

Abstract

Discourse connectives are lexical items like “but” and “so” that are well-known to influence the online processing of the discourse relations they convey. Yet, discourse relations like causality or contrast can also be signaled by other means than connectives, such as syntactic structures. So far, the influence of these alternative signals for discourse processing has been comparatively under-researched. In particular, their processing in a second language remains entirely unexplored. In a series of three self-paced reading experiments, we compare the reading patterns of contrastive relations by native French-speakers and non-native speakers of French with English as a first language. We focus on the effect of syntactic parallelism and how it interacts with different types of connectives. We test whether native and non-native readers equally recruit parallelism to process contrast in combination with or without a connective (Experiment 1), with a frequent vs. infrequent connective (Experiment 2) and with an ambiguous vs. unambiguous connective (Experiment 3), thus varying the explicitness and ease of retrieval of the contrast relation. Our results indicate that parallelism plays an important role for both groups of readers, but that it is a more prominent cue for non-native speakers, while its effect is modulated by task difficulty for native participants.

How Robust Is Discourse Processing for Native Readers? The Role of Connectives and the Coherence Relations They Convey

“…We allowed longer times in this case because a whole sentence rather than a sentence segment was presented. As in similar literature on this subject ( Crible et al, 2021 ), we also performed a log-transformation. These two measures reduced the skewness of our data (as tested with the skweness() function of the moments package, Komsta and Novomestky, 2015 ).…”

“…A further indication that ambiguous connectives might affect online processing may come from research testing the processing of underspecified connectives, such as and when used to indicate contrastive relations ( Crible and Pickering, 2020 ; Crible et al, 2021 ) or causal relations ( Cain and Nash, 2011 ; Koornneef and Sanders, 2013 ), showing that inferring the intended coherence relation is not always facilitated when the connective is underspecified. However, the connectives tested in these studies (i.e., and , but , and although ) are all rather frequently used.…”

“…Care was taken to ensure that the items did not contain a repetitive, parallel-structure (as in “I go on holiday because you go on holiday”) since this structure would facilitate processing ( Crible and Pickering, 2020 ; Crible et al, 2021 ). In addition, for the items that contained a causal relation, further care was taken to ensure that establishing a causal link did not require a highly subjective point of view or contextual interpretation.…”

Processing clause-internal discourse relations in a second language

“…As such, the error may remain unnoticed. An indication that this assumption might be on the right track comes from the observation that connectives do not always represent a benefit for non-native readers (Crible et al 2021;Zufferey & Gygax, 2017).…”

“…When reading a text in a second language, correct identification and interpretation of the underlying coherence relations can be challenging. Non-native readers are confronted with difficulties such as complex or opaque connectives that are used to signal them (Wetzel, Zufferey & Gygax, 2020, Zufferey & Gygax, 2017, relations with a high degree of cognitive complexity (Sanders, Spooren & Noordman, 1992) or relations that are indicated by infrequent or underspecified connectives (Crible, Wetzel & Zufferey, 2021). Furthermore, given that coherence relations are expressed differently across different languages (e.g., Kanno, 1989), it is not surprising that non-native writers also produce erroneous uses of connectives, due to cross-linguistic influences from their first language (e.g., Field & Yip, 1992;Lamiroy, 1994;Granger & Tyson, 1996;Altenberg & Tapper, 1998).…”