Abstract

Three experiments were conducted to explore the processing characteristics of causal connectives in 2-sentence discourses. In Experiment I, either causal or additive discourses with or without causal/ additive connectives were presented to subjects, and the reading time for the second sentence of each pair was measured. With additive discourses, the presence or absence of an additive connective produced no significant difference in reading time, while the presence of a causal connective in a causal discourse entailed a faster reading time. In Experiment 2, it was found that the presence or absence of connectives made no difference on the reading time for the last word in the first sentence, while it caused a longer reading time for the last word in the second sentence. The former indicates the absence of the integrative processing during reading the first sentence, while the latter reflects a facilitation of integration of sentence pair initiated by the causal connective. In Experiment 3, a recognition test for the verb of the precedent sentence was given either at the beginning or at the end position of the second sentence, and it was found that under the connective-absent condition the recognition time was faster at the beginning position while it was faster at the end position under the connective-present condition, suggesting that the presence or absence of causal connectives entails different integrative processing. The general implications of the results of three experiments were discussed further in relation to the formation of coherent representation of discourses.