Two-Part Discourse Markers in Chinese: The Processing of Causal and Concessive Relations

Prior work has shown that comprehenders can predict upcoming discourse relations based on two-part markers such as on the one hand…on the other hand or true/sure…but in English, Dutch and German. Chinese has a larger inventory of such two-part markers, and these pairs thus might have larger effects on processing. In the present study, we investigated whether Chinese readers show a similar processing advantage for two-part connectives, and whether this facilitation differs across relation types. We compare processing of causal relations to concessive relations, which are cognitively more complex. Specifically, we conducted two self-paced reading experiments testing whether concessive two-part connectives yield a greater processing advantage than causal connectives. Across both experiments, we found no evidence that the presence of the first marker facilitated processing of the second marker, nor that concessive relations elicited greater facilitation than causal relations. Bayes factor analyses provided evidence against the hypothesized interaction. These findings suggest that, unlike previous findings in Indo-European languages, two-part connectives in Chinese may not consistently enhance processing, which might be due to the greater reliance on contextual and pragmatic cues in discourse comprehension. Our results contribute to the growing body of cross-linguistic research indicating that the facilitative role of connectives is language- and context-dependent.