Ted Sanders

Toward a taxonomy of coherence relations

Understanding a discourse means constructing a coherent representation of that discourse. Inferring coherence relations, such as cause‐consequence and claim‐argument, is a necessary condition for a discourse representation to be coherent. Despite some descriptively fairly adequate proposals in the literature, there is still no theoretically satisfying account of the links that make a discourse coherent. An adequate account of the relations establishing coherence has to be psychologically plausible, because coherence relations are ultimately cognitive relations. We are proposing a taxonomy that classifies coherence relations in terms of four cognitively salient primitives, such as the polarity of the relation and the pragmatic or semantic character of the link between the units. A classification experiment using fragments of written discourse showed that the 12 classes of coherence relations distinguished in the taxonomy appear to be intuitively plausible and applicable. A second experiment investigating t...

The classification of coherence relations and their linguistic markers: An exploration of two languages☆

Abstract It has become popular among discourse linguists to explain a texts coherence by identifying ‘coherence relations’ which apply at various levels between its component spans. However, there is currently no overall agreement about how to define a standard set of coherence relations, and even about what the coherence relations in a text are intended to represent. In this paper, both questions are addressed: we outline a conception of relations as modelling psychological constructs used by readers and writers, and suggest how a limited set of categories of coherence relations can be identified. We relate two independent methods for investigating relations, one drawing mainly on psycholinguistic experiments on Dutch speaking subjects, the other starting from a study of the ‘cue phrases’ used to signal relations in English text. Both approaches lead to classifications of relations and cue phrases. We examine to what extent these classifications converge - and to what extent they accord with the psychologically motivated classification - in a comparative study of a set of cue phrases in English and Dutch. Interesting similarities are noted on both counts.

Semantic and pragmatic sources of coherence: On the categorization of coherence relations in context

This article discusses a distinction present in many theories of relation categorization: the Source of Coherence, which distinguishes between semantic and pragmatic relations. Existing categorizations of both relations and connectives show a reasonable consensus on prototypical examples. Still, there many ambiguous cases. How can the distinction be clarified? And to what extent does it depend on the context in which relations occur? A more precise text‐linguistic definition is presented in the form of a paraphrase test, intended to systematically check analysts’ intuitions. A paraphrase experiment shows that language users recognize the difference between clear cases in context. More importantly, the type of context (descriptive, argumentative) appeared not to influence the interpretation of clear cases, whereas subjects’ judgements of ambiguous relations are influenced by the type of context. A corpus study further illustrates the link between text type and relation type: Informative texts are dominated...

What Makes Speech Sound Fluent? The Contributions of Pauses, Speed and Repairs.

The oral fluency level of an L2 speaker is often used as a measure in assessing language proficiency. The present study reports on four experiments investigating the contributions of three fluency aspects (pauses, speed and repairs) to perceived fluency. In Experiment 1 untrained raters evaluated the oral fluency of L2 Dutch speakers. Using specific acoustic measures of pause, speed and repair phenomena, linear regression analyses revealed that pause and speed measures best predicted the subjective fluency ratings, and that repair measures contributed only very little. A second research question sought to account for these results by investigating perceptual sensitivity to acoustic pause, speed and repair phenomena, possibly accounting for the results from Experiment 1. In Experiments 2–4 three new groups of untrained raters rated the same L2 speech materials from Experiment 1 on the use of pauses, speed and repairs. A comparison of the results from perceptual sensitivity (Experiments 2–4) with fluency perception (Experiment 1) showed that perceptual sensitivity alone could not account for the contributions of the three aspects to perceived fluency. We conclude that listeners weigh the importance of the perceived aspects of fluency to come to an overall judgment.

The impact of relational markers on expository text comprehension in L1 and L2

This article reports on an experimentinvestigating the impact of causal discoursemarkers (connectives and signaling phrases) onthe comprehension of expository texts in L1 andL2. Although several psycholinguistic studieshave investigated the impact of connectives andlexical markers of text structure oncomprehension (i.e. off-line), there is noconsensus on the exact effect of explicitdiscourse markers on text understanding; threedifferent findings are reported in theliterature: markers would have a facilitatingeffect, an interfering effect or no effect atall. The first goal of this article is toclarify this problem of contradicting resultsby limiting the scope of the study to causalrelations, and to one specific text type:expository texts. Furthermore, the naturalnessof the experimental texts was controlled,readers did not need specific backgroundknowledge to understand the texts and theexperimental method consisted of open answerquestioning. Our second goal is to investigateto what extent a supposed effect of linguisticmarking depends on readers proficiency in afirst or second language.The experiment consisted in the reading of short expository texts in two languages, Dutchand French, which both functioned as L1 and L2.The results indicate that readers benefit fromthe presence of causal relational markers bothin L1 and in L2. Implications for (theoriesof) text processing are discussed, as well asfor the further insights in readingcomprehension in L1 and L2.

Coherence Marking, Prior Knowledge, and Comprehension of Informative and Persuasive Texts: Sorting Things Out

Coherence plays a central role when readers construct meaning from a text. Previous research has shown how coherence marking affects text processing and representation. However, this effect seems to depend on readers prior knowledge of the text content: Low knowledge readers benefit from coherence marking, whereas high knowledge readers benefit from a more implicit text (McNamara & Kintsch, 1996). Because this interaction was not consistently found in previous research, this article takes a closer look at the operationalization of the experimental variables: coherence marking, prior knowledge, and text comprehension. Also, this article compares the effect on both informative and persuasive texts. Results indicate that linguistic marking of coherence indeed interacts with prior knowledge in the informative genre, but not in the persuasive genre.

Cohesion and Coherence: Linguistic Approaches

How can the connectedness in text and discourse be accounted for? The principled differences between two answers to this question are discussed. While a cohesion approach seeks the answer in overt textual signals, a coherence approach considers connectedness to be of a cognitive nature. The coherence paradigm is dominant in most recent work on the structure and the processing of discourse. It opens the way to a fruitful interaction between text linguistics, discourse psychology, and cognitive science, but at the same does not neglect the attention for linguistic detail typical of the cohesion approach.

Establishing coherence relations in discourse: The influence of implicit causality and connectives on pronoun resolution

Many studies have shown that readers and listeners recruit verb-based implicit causality information rapidly in the service of pronoun resolution. However, since most of these studies focused on constructions in which because connected the two critical clauses, it is unclear to what extent implicit causality information affects the processing of pronouns embedded in other types of coherence relations. In an eye-tracking and completion study we addressed this void by varying whether because, but, and and joined a primary clause containing the implicit causality verb, with a secondary clause containing a critical gender-marked pronoun. The results showed that the claims made for implicit causality hold if the connective because is present (i.e., a reading time delay following a pronoun that is inconsistent with the implicit causality bias of the verb), but do not generalise to other connectives like but and and. This shows that the strength and persistence of implicit causality as a pronoun resolution cue depends on the coherence relation in which the verb, the antecedent and the pronoun appear.

Causal connectives in discourse processing: How differences in subjectivity are reflected in eye movements

Causal connectives are often considered to provide crucial information about the discourse structure; they signal a causal relation between two text segments. However, in many languages of the world causal connectives specialise in either subjective or objective causal relations. We investigate whether this type of (discourse) information is used during the online processing of causal connectives by focusing on the Dutch connectives want and omdat, both translated by because. In three eye-tracking studies we demonstrate that the Dutch connective want, which is a prototypical marker of subjective CLAIM–ARGUMENT relations, leads to an immediate processing disadvantage compared to omdat, a prototypical marker of objective CONSEQUENCE–CAUSE relations. This effect was observed at the words immediately following the connective, at which point readers cannot yet establish the causal relation on the basis of the content, which means that the effect is solely induced by the connectives. In Experiment 2 we demonstrate that this effect is related to the representation of the first clause of a want relation as a mental state. In Experiment 3, we show that the use of omdat in relations that do not allow for a CONSEQUENCE–CAUSE interpretation leads to serious processing difficulties at the end of those relations. On the basis of these results, we argue that want triggers a subjective mental state interpretation of S1, whereas omdat triggers the construction of an objective CONSEQUENCE–CAUSE relation. These results illustrate that causal connectives provide subtle information about semantic-pragmatic distinctions between types of causal relations, which immediately influences online processing.

Accessibility in Text and Discourse Processing.

Accessibility is one of the most important challenges at the intersection of linguistic and psycholinguistic studies of text and discourse processing. Linguists have shown how linguistic indicators of referential coherence show a systematic pattern: Longer linguistic forms (like full lexical NPs) tend to be used when referents are relatively low accessible, shorter forms (pronouns and zero anaphora) are used when referents are highly accessible. This linguistic theory fits in nicely with a dynamic view of text and discourse processing: When a reader proceeds through a text, the activation of concepts as part of the readers representation fluctuates constantly. Hypotheses considering activation patterns can be tested with on-line research methods like reading time or eye-movement recording. The articles in this special issue show how accessibility phenomena need to be studied from a linguistic and a psycholinguistic angle, and in the latter case from interpretation as well as production.