The Effect of Anaphoric References and Noun Phrase Organizers on Paragraph Comprhension

Abstract

Abstract. Based on Halliday & Hasan's theory of textual cohesion, anaphoric references and noun phrase organizers may serve as cohesive ties linking separate sentences into unified paragraphs. It was hypothesized their presence would affect paragraph comprehension and reading time. 12 experimental paragraphs were constructed. Alternate conditions incorporated noun phrase organizers and references. 119 college students read paragraphs and completed a multiple choice recognition test. Analysis of variance indicated only the noun phrase condition was significant. Within subject repeated measures analysis of variance indicated the influence of the noun phrase organizer could be attributed to its position in the initial sentence of the paragraph. No difference in time scores by paragraph condition was indicated. That lexical but not reference items influenced memory is discussed in terms of "old" and "new" information and alternate "checking" systems.A prose text has many elements: grammatical, semantic, and rhetorical. Each aspect may serve not only as a cue to the reader to organize the information the prose contains but also may influence the reader's comprehension and memory of that information.Textual cues become available to the reader's memory structure as they are read. The memorial impact of many kinds of cues has already been assessed. Kintsch and Keenan (1973) found that the number of propositions in the text affects both retention and reading rate. Kintsch, Kozminsky, Streby, McKoon, and Keenan (1975) determined that content variables as represented by the number of word concepts affect recall. Blount and Johnson (1973) concluded that temporal order and verb structure influence recall of sentences embedded within paragraphs. Other aspects of connected prose that affect memory include the theme (Bransford and Johnson,

Identifying topic sentencehood

“…The coreferential model was also very poor at identifying the expert-rated topic sentences from this corpus. The results from Experiment 3, in conjunction with those from a number of other studies (e.g., Aulls, 1975;Fishman, 1978;Goldman et al, 1995;Graesser et al, 2003;McNamara et al, 1996), cause us to speculate that given a complete paragraph structure, skilled/knowledgeable readers can process the entire information of a paragraph and will tend to assign topic sentencehood to the first sentence of the paragraph.…”

“…This lack of topic sentencehood (much lamented by Braddock, 1974) may be less important for texts for which writers and readers share the same discourse community and, therefore, shared knowledge can be assumed. However, low-knowledge and/or less skilled readers may be in particular need of explicit cues in the text, such as topic sentences, to help them organize the information in the text (Aulls, 1975;Fishman, 1978;Goldman, Saul, & Coté, 1995;Graesser et al, 2003;McNamara et al, 1996). Thus, the apparent utility of topic sentences suggests that using them more often may be beneficial.…”

Redundancy and the cohesion doze

“…Other researchers found no direct connection between anaphora and reading difficulty for either students of EFL (Baten, 1981) or for native English speakers (Meyer, 1975;Fishman, 1978). It was not clear whether their findings reflected a lack of relation or a shortcoming of the measuring devices used to evaluate this relation.…”

The Morpho-Syntactic and Semantic-Pragmatic Realisation of Definiteness and Specificity in Swahili

“…Anaphoric reference involves co-referring to a particular referent in the discourse by using linguistic elements (Fishman 1978;Mojapelo 2013). Since Swahili does not have articles, it uses demonstratives, pronouns, full NPs, SMs and OMs to fulfil this purpose.…”