A considerable body of research has examined the age-old assertion that reading literature enhances empathy, however, mixed results have been found. The present study attempts to clarify such disparities, investigating the role of foregrounding in possible differences in readers' processing of literary texts and its connection with readers'…

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…

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…

Two questionnaire experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of 2 styles (hyperbole and orthographically deviant writing style) on the perception of hiniku, 'quasi-irony', and oseji, 'quasi-flattery', in the Japanese language. In each experiment, stories were constructed in which a speaker made a remark evaluating the addressee's…

This study examines a corpus of conversations of Turkish preschool-age children with adults, with the goal of analyzing 2 types of extended discourse structures (i.e., lists and narratives). Lists and narratives are compared with respect to (a) their internal structures, and (b) their social functions in the participants' daily interactions. The…