We report three experiments that assess whether structural priming in a question-answer dialogue context is affected by the use of direct requests, conventional indirect requests, and nonconventional indirect requests. In Experiments 1 and 2, experimenters made phone calls to businesses and asked either "Can you tell me (at) what time you…

Through a structured examination of four English causal discourse connectives, our article tackles a gap in the existing research, which focuses mainly on written language production, and entirely lacks attests on English spoken discourse. Given the alleged general nature of English connectives commonly emphasized in the literature, the underlying…

Recent studies of appositives have turned up differences between sentence-medial appositives and sentence-final appositives, for instance, in their availability for discourse continuations. Three experiments investigated whether medial appositives are more difficult to comprehend than final appositives and if so why. Experiment 1 tested…

Domain restriction is a pervasive if often neglected part of discourse comprehension. Speakers and authors implicitly limit the domain of discourse of quantifiers (e.g., "everyone") and noun phrases (e.g., "the girls"). Our previous research shows that an initial temporal or locative prepositional phrase (PP), which introduces…

When telling a story, a speaker needs to refer to story characters using appropriate expressions, which requires a mental model of the discourse. We hypothesize that, compared to those of adults, children's discourse models are based more on factors that are less cognitively demanding, such as animacy, and as they grow older, discourse factors…

This article presents a self-paced reading study comparing the online processing of interclausal discourse relations in native speakers of English and German. The study aims to contribute to two overarching questions: First, it puts to the test the so-called causality-by-default hypothesis, which states that causality is a default assumption,…

This study investigated the role of contextual and prosodic information in turn-end estimation by means of a button-press task. We presented participants with turns extracted from a corpus of telephone calls visually (i.e., in transcribed form, word-by-word) and auditorily, and asked them to anticipate turn ends by pressing a button. The…

Previous research has shown that talker identity and speaking style affect the processing of morphosyntactic violations. The present study examined whether speaking style modulates comprehension and subsequent production of case variants in German prepositional phrases across the life span. To this end, we conducted a sentence repetition and…

Reference production is often studied through single dimensions of contrast (e.g., "tall glass" when there are one or two glasses of varying height). Yet real-world communication is rarely so simple, raising questions about the factors guiding more complex referents. The current study examines decisions to mention set relations (e.g.,…

Speakers use speech and gestures to represent referents in discourse. Depending on referents' information status, in speech speakers will vary richness of expression (e.g., lexical noun phrase [NP]/pronoun), nominal definiteness (indefinite/definite), and grammatical role (subject/object). This study tested whether these three linguistic markers…

This study aims to establish whether the processing of different connectives (e.g., "and," "but") and different coherence relations (addition, contrast) can be modulated by a structural feature of the connected segments--namely, parallelism. While "but" is mainly used to contrast two expressions, "and"…

Different words generally have different meanings. However, some words seemingly share similar meanings. An example are null and overt pronouns in Italian, which both refer to an individual in the discourse. Is the interpretation and processing of a form affected by the existence of another form with a similar meaning? With a pupillary response…

In discourse processing, speakers collaborate toward a shared mental model by establishing and recruiting prominence relations between different discourse referents. In this article we investigate to what extent the possibility to infer a referent's existence from preceding context (as indicated by the referent's information status as inferred or…

Plural phrases are open to many interpretations in English, where cumulative interpretations of noun and verb phrases are possible without any disambiguating morphology. A sentence like "Every week, the high school kids went to the movies or the ballgame" might involve quantifying over multiple occurrences of a single scenario, in which…

Three self-paced reading experiments explored the processing of "only" and its interaction with context. In isolated sentences, the focus particle "only" predicts an upcoming contrast. Ambiguous replacive sentences (e.g., "The curator embarrassed the gallery owner in public, not the artist") with "only" on the subject or object showed faster…