Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T10:59:57.555Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Role of Connectives in the Comprehension of Spontaneous Spoken Discourse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2013

Jazmín Cevasco
Jazmín Cevasco*
Affiliation:
Universidad de Buenos Aires (Argentina)
*
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jazmín Cevasco. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Clay 2818, 7'D'. Buenos Aires, Argentina. Phone: (011-5411)4774-1566. E-mail: yomh0001@umn.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The role of connectives in the comprehension of spontaneous spoken discourse has been investigated by testing the effect of the connective ‘but’ in the realization of causal inferences and the integration of adjacent statements. The role of this connective in the realization of causal inferences has been tested through a judgment task. The role of ‘but’ in the integration of the adjacent statements has been tested through a word monitoring task. The presence of the connective resulted in shorter reaction times for the realization of causal inferences in the judgment task, but it did not result in shorter reaction times for the integration of adjacent statements, as measured by the word monitoring task. These results suggest that listeners are able to make use of connectives to help them create and decide on the existence of causal connections, but not to process and recognize the surface form of the second statement of the pair.

El rol de los conectores en la comprensión de discurso oral espontáneo ha sido estudiado examinando el efecto del conector ‘pero’ en la realización de inferencias causales y en la integración de enunciados adyacentes. El rol de este conector en la realización de inferencias causales ha sido investigado a través de una tarea de elaboración. El rol de ‘pero’ en la integración de enunciados adyacentes ha sido investigado a través de una tarea de monitoreo de palabras. La presencia del conector resultó en menores tiempos de reacción para la realización de inferencias causales en la tarea de elaboración, pero no resultó en tiempos menores de reacción para la integración de enunciados adyacentes en la tarea de monitoreo de palabras. Estos resultados sugieren que los oyentes son capaces de utilizar la presencia de un conector para crear y decidir acerca de la existencia de conexiones causales entre los enunciados, pero no para procesar y reconocer la forma superficial del segundo enunciado del par conectado.

Keywords

connectivesspoken discoursecausal inferencescomprehensionconectoresdiscurso oralinferencias causalescomprensión
Type
Research Article
Information
The Spanish Journal of Psychology , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , May 2009 , pp. 56 - 65
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Brennan, S.E. & Schober, M.F. (2001). How Listeners Compensate for Disfluencies in Spontaneous Speech. Journal of Memory and Language 44, 274–296.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Calvo, M.G., & Castillo, M.D. (2001). Bias in predictive inferences during reading. Discourse Processes, 32, 43–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campion, N., & Rossi, J.P. (2001). Associative and causal constraints in the process of generating predictive inferences. Discourse Processes, 31, 263–291.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caron, J., Micko, HC & Thüring, M. (1988). Conjunctions and the recall of composite sentences. Journal of Memory & Language, 27, 309–323.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cevasco, J., & van den Broek, P (in press). The importance of causal connections in the comprehension of spontaneous discourse. Psicothema.Google Scholar
Deaton, J. A., & Gernsbacher, M. A. (in press). Causal conjunctions and implicit causality cue mapping in sentence comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language.Google Scholar
Degand, E., Lefevre, N., & Bestgen, Y. (1999). The impact of connectives and anaphoric expressions on expository discourse comprehension. Document Design, 1(1), 39–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
de Vega, M. (2005). El procesamiento de oraciones con conectores adversativos y causales. Cognitiva, 17, 85–108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Du Bois, J. W., Chafe, W. L., Meyer, C., & Thompson, S. A. (2000). Santa Barbara corpus of spoken American English Part-I. CD-ROM. Philadelphia, PA: LDC.Google Scholar
Du Bois, J.W., Chafe, W.L., Meyer, C., & Thompson, S.A. (2002). Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English Part-I and Part-II. CD-ROM. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium.Google Scholar
Ferreira, F., & Anes, M. (1994). Why study spoken language processing? In Gernsbacher, M. (Ed.), Handbook of Psycholinguistics. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Fox Tree, J.E. (1995). The effects of false starts and repetitions on the processing of subsequent words in spontaneous speech. Journal of Memory and Language, 34, 709–738.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fox Tree, J. E. (2001). Listeners' uses of um and uh in speech comprehension. Memory and Cognition, 29, 320–326.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fox Tree, J. E. (2002). Interpretations of pauses and ums at turn exchanges. Discourse Processes, 34, 37–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Golding, J.M., Millis, K.K., Hauselt, J., & Sego, S.A. (1995). The effect of connectives and causal relatedness on text comprehension. In Lorch, R.F. & O'Brien, E.J. (Eds.), Sources of coherence in reading (pp 127–143). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.Google Scholar
Goldman, S. R., & Varnhagen, C. K. (1986). Memory for embedded and sequential story structures. Journal of Memory and Language, 25, 401–418.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guzman, A. E., & Klin, C. M. (2000). Maintaining global coherence in reading: The role of sentence boundaries. Memory and Cognition, 28(5), 722–730.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Haberlandt, K. (1982). Reader expectations in text comprehension. In Ny, J. Le & Kintsch, W. (Eds.). Language and Comprehension. Amsterdam: North-Holland.Google Scholar
Halliday, M. and Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. Longman, London.Google Scholar
Kraljic, T. & Brennan, S. (2005). Prosodic disambiguation of syntactic structure: For the speaker or for the addressee? Cognitive Psychology, 50, 194–231.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lickley, R., & Bard, E. (1998). When can listeners detect disfluency in spontaneous speech? Language and Speech, 41, 203–226.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mandler, J.M. & Johnson, N.S. (1977). Remembrance of things parsed: story structure and recall. Cognitive Psychology, 9, 111–151.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marslen-Wilson, W.D., & Tyler, L.K. (1980). The temporal structure of spoken language understanding, Cognition, 8, 1–71.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Marslen-Wilson, W.D., Tyler, L.K., & Koster, C. (1993). Integrative processes in utterance resolution. Journal of Memory and Language, 32, 647–666.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marslen-Wilson, W.D. & Welsh, A. (1978). Processing interactions and lexical access during word-recognition in continuous speech. Cognitive Psychology, 10, 29–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maury, P. & Teisserenc, A. (2005). The role of connectives in science text comprehension and memory. Language and Cognitive Processes, 20 (3), 489–512.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Millis, K. K., Graesser, A. C., & Haberlandt, K. (1993). The impact of connectives on the memory for expository text. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 7, 317–339.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Millis, K. K. & Just, M. (1994). The influence of connectives on sentence comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 33, 128–147.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Millis, K. K., & Magliano, J. P. (1999). The co-influence of grammatical markers and comprehender goals on the memory for short discourse. Journal of Memory and Language, 41, 183–198.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murray, J. D. (1995). Logical connectives and local coherence. In Lorch, F. & O'Brien, D. (Eds.), Sources of coherence in reading (pp. 75–94). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Murray, J. D. (1997). Connectives and narrative text: the role of continuity. Memory and Cognition, 25(2), 227–236.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
O'Brien, E.J., and Myers, J.L. (1987). The role of causal connections in the retrieval of text. Memory and Cognition, 15, 419–427.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sanders, T.J.M., & Noordman, L.G.M. (2000). The role of coherence relations and their linguistic markers in text processing. Discourse Processes, 29(1), 37–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schafer, A. J., Speer, S., Warren, P., & White, S.D. (2000). Intonational disambiguation in sentence production and comprehension. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 29, 169–182.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schiffrin, D. (1987). Discourse Markers. Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schiffrin, D. (1994). Approaches to discourse. Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Shears, C., & Chiarello, C. (2004). Knowledge-based inferences are not general. Discourse Processes, 38, 31–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shears, C.Miller, V., Ball, M., Hawkins, A., Griggs, J., Varner, A. (2007). Cognitive demand differences in causal inferences: Characters' plans are more difficult to comprehend than physical causation. Discourse Processes, 43, 1–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Singer, M., & O'Connell, G. (2003). Robust inference processes in expository text comprehension. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 15 (4), 607–631.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sloutsky, V. M., & Goldvarg, Y. (2004). Mental representation of logical connectives. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology: A, Human Experimental Psychology: 57(4), 636–665.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Snedeker, J., & Trueswell, J. (2003). Using prosody to avoid ambiguity: Effects of speaker awareness and referential context. Journal of Memory and Language, 48, 103–130.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stubbs, M. (1983). Discourse Analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Trabasso, T. & Sperry, L. L. (1985). Causal relatedness and importance of story events. Journal of Memory and Language, 24, 595–611.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trabasso, T. & van den Broek, P. (1985). Causal thinking and the representation of narrative events. Journal of Memory and Language, 24, 612–630.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
van den Broek, P. (1990). The causal inference maker: towards a process of inference generation in text comprehension. In Balota, D.A., d'Arcais, G.B. Flores, and Rayner, K., Comprehension Processes in Reading (pp. 423–445). Hillsdale, NY: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
van den Broek, P., & Trabasso, T. (1986). Causal network versus goal hierarchies in summarizing text. Discourse Processes, 9, 1–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wiley, J., & Myers, J. L. (2003). Availability and accessibility of information and causal inferences from scientific text. Discourse Processes, 36(2), 109–129.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zwaan, R. A., & Madden, C. (2004). Updating situation models. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 30, 283–288.Google ScholarPubMed
Zwaan, R.A., & Radvansky, G.A. (1998). Situation models in language comprehension and memory. Psychological Bulletin, 123,162–185.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed