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 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…

We used Barton and Sanford's (1993) anomaly detection task to investigate text processing differences between skilled and less-skilled readers. The results of 2 experiments showed that many readers had the tendency to process text in a shallow or incomplete manner, frequently failing to detect anomalous nouns or noun phrases (NPs) in text such as…

After reading text such as Amanda was bouncing all over because she had taken too many tranquilizing sedatives in one day, young adult readers frequently fail to report that they noticed the anomalous noun phrase (NP). Although young readers of all skill levels are susceptible to this kind of shallow semantic processing, less-skilled readers are…