The coherence threshold marks the point at which a reader has gained a sufficient comprehension level to move on in a text. Previous research has demonstrated that the readers' coherence threshold can be manipulated by increasing or decreasing task demands. The present experiments examined a manipulation of the coherence threshold within the text…

Communicating via text-only computer-mediated communication (CMC) channels is associated with a number of issues that would impair users in achieving dialogue coherence and goals. It has been suggested that humans have devised novel adaptive strategies to deal with those issues. However, it could be that humans rely on "classic"…

This study examined how the contribution of self-explanation to science text comprehension is affected by the cohesion of a text at a local level. Psychology undergraduates read and self-explained a science text with either low or high local cohesion. Local cohesion was manipulated by the presence or absence of connectives and referential words or…

The tracking of entities in discourse is known to be a bimodal phenomenon. Speakers achieve cohesion in speech by alternating between full lexical forms, pronouns, and zero anaphora as they track referents. They also track referents in co-speech gestures. In this study, we explored how viewpoint is deployed in reference tracking, focusing on…

Previous researchers have argued that objects associated with a protagonist may be foregrounded, or held active, in memory. This study expanded on previous work by using an inconsistency paradigm to investigate the effects of protagonist association on object accessibility. Readers experienced more processing difficulty when a target sentence…