In this study participants read plausible and implausible sentences containing concessive and causal relations in Chinese, for instance, "[Although/Because] he has a talent for language, he [doesn't like/likes] learning English." In two self-paced reading experiments (Experiments 1 and 2), we consistently found the plausibility effect at…

We argue that to understand how readers process narrative, it is necessary to distinguish between psychological stance (i.e., how the narrator evaluates events and characters) and physical perspective (i.e., the angle of view from which events are described). Although these are metaphorically related, the cognitive processes that produce such a…

Causal sequences can be segmented into cause and effect. However, some argue causal relations in discourse are by default in "effect-cause" order. Others claim "cause-effect" order is easier to process and the default way of expressing causality, due to iconicity. We conducted experiments testing participants' production…