Although it is clear that unaccented referring expressions are associated with given information in a discourse, it is less clear what aspects of givenness are relevant. We examine whether listeners' expectation of givenness depends on repetition of a referring expression or on contextual evocation of a referent. The results from two visual world…

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…

People often speak ambiguously, as in the case of "indirect requests." Certain indirect requests are conventional and thus straightforward to interpret, such as "Can you turn on the heater?", but others require substantial additional inference, such as "It's cold in here." How do comprehenders make inferences about a…

Comprehension substantially benefits from attending to, thinking about, and mentally representing the sources of any presented information. Such processes require mental effort and unfortunately people do not always engage in such activities. The current article presents a nascent, evolving model of discourse comprehension that formalizes…

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,…

Narratives frequently represent perceptions that allow for multiple interpretations in terms of perspective: Perceptions can be interpreted from the narrator's viewpoint as well as the character's viewpoint. Two experiments examined the role of contextual viewpoint markers and verb tense in readers' interpretation of such ambiguous perceptions.…

Ambiguity in discourse is pervasive, yet mechanisms of production and processing suggest that it tends to be compensated in context. The present study sets out to analyze the combination of discourse markers (such as "but" or "moreover") with other discourse signals (such as semantic relations or punctuation marks) across three…

We often use pronouns like it or they without explicitly mentioned antecedents. We asked whether the human processing system that resolves such indirect pronouns uses the immediate visual-sensory context in multimodal discourse. Our results showed that people had no difficulty understanding conceptually central referents, whether explicitly…

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"…

In spoken discourse, understanding irony requires the apprehension of subtle cues, such as the speaker's tone of voice (prosody), which often reveal the speaker's affective stance toward the listener in the context of the utterance. To shed light on the interplay of linguistic content and prosody on impressions of spoken criticisms and compliments…

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…

Understanding discourse connectives is an important step to achieving effective verbal communication. Yet, the ability of adult native speakers to understand the broad range of connectives found in most Indo-European languages has seldom been assessed. In this article we demonstrate that some adults have difficulties recognizing correct and…

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…

One of the major aims of discourse-processing literature is to understand whether and when readers form discourse-level representations online. To test this, two word-by-word, self-paced reading experiments investigated the time course of integrating incoming information about the protagonist into the unfolding discourse-level representation in…