Lexical and Structural Cues to Discourse Processing in First and Second Language.

ABSTRACT: Discourse connectives are lexical items like "but" and "so" that are well-known to influence the online processing of the discourse relations they convey. Yet, discourse relations like causality or contrast can also be signaled by other means than connectives, such as syntactic structures. So far, the influence of these alternative signals for discourse processing has been comparatively under-researched. In particular, their processing in a second language remains entirely unexplored. In a series of three self-paced reading experiments, we compare the reading patterns of contrastive relations by native French-speakers and non-native speakers of French with English as a first language. We focus on the effect of syntactic parallelism and how it interacts with different types of connectives.

SUBMITTER: Crible L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8280496 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature