The reported study investigated how newlyweds linguistically encode changes in relationship commitment in retrospective courtship narratives. In particular, we explored their use of emotion words and its correspondence with "temporal agency," that is, the attribution of temporal change to human actors or to abstract events and processes.…

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.,…

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…

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"…

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…

We report on three experiments that aim at measuring the role of prosody in the acceptability and interpretation of discourse relations between utterances connected by two French discourse markers, viz. "et" "and" and "alors" "then/well." These two discourse markers are highly polyfunctional: "et"…

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…

When speakers coordinate with one another, they have available a range of alternatives for conceptualizing and describing spatial relationships. To understand the features of successful communication in collaborative spatial tasks, it is important to identify factors that shape speakers' linguistic choices and evaluate them in relation to task…

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…

This study investigates the influence of causal and concessive relations on discourse coherence in Chinese by means of eye movement and self-paced reading techniques. We use the sentential structure like "NP[subscript HUMAN] moved from place A to place B, {because ([Chinese characters omitted] yinwei) /although ([Chinese characters omitted]…

Despite a seemingly fragmented interactional context, teachers and students in classrooms routinely manage to co-construct coherent, inter-related, and individually adapted learning trajectories distributed over days and weeks. The aim of this article is to explore with what interactional resources progressivity is accomplished in learning…

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…

Analyses of 34 cases of direct reported thought found in ordinary Korean conversations illustrate a routine practice in the use of reported thought-reenacting a prior thought to demonstrate how the speaker's current stance originated. Often, such thoughts are not simply momentary, isolated thoughts in passing but are consequential thoughts…