Connectives and narrative text: the role of continuity

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Linguistics
• Psycholinguistics

Background:

• Connectives are linguistic devices crucial for signaling relationships between sentences.
• Recent research highlights the significance of connectives in on-line text processing.
• Understanding connective function is key to comprehending text continuity and coherence.

Purpose of the Study:

• To test the hypothesis that connectives impact on-line processing based on their signaling of continuity or departure from text events.
• To investigate how different types of connectives (additive, causal, adversative) influence sentence generation and reading comprehension.
• To determine the extent to which connectives disrupt text processing when they signal a departure from narrative continuity.

Main Methods:

• Experiment 1: Participants generated sentences following a stimulus, with initial words including additive, causal, or adversative connectives.
• Experiments 2 & 3: Participants read sentence pairs with inappropriately placed connectives, measuring reading time and coherence ratings.
• Utilized sentence generation, reading time, and coherence judgments to assess processing disruption.

Main Results:

• Additive and causal connectives led to the generation of text events continuous with the stimulus.
• Adversative connectives resulted in the generation of discontinuous text events.
• Adversative connectives caused the most significant processing disruption, evidenced by longer reading times and lower coherence ratings.

Conclusions:

• The findings support the continuity hypothesis: connectives signaling a departure from narrative flow cause greater processing disruption.
• Adversative connectives, by signaling discontinuity, are more likely to impede on-line text processing.
• Future research should further explore the nuanced roles of connectives in real-time language comprehension.