We studied the role of discourse coherence relations on structure formulation in sentence production by examining whether a connective, an essential signal of coherence relations, modulates the tendency for speakers to reuse sentence structures (i.e., structural priming). We further examined three possible modulating factors: the type of…

Discourse coherence is a common phenomenon in linguistic studies, and plays an important role in discourse analysis. As a common and extremely important type of language phenomena, discourse coherence has drawn more and more scholars' attention, but they emphasis on partial discourse coherence, paying a little attention to holistic coherence. The…

Information necessary to understand many English sentences appears to be supplied by a source outside the sentence which is composed of a fund of knowledge accumulated throughout life. This fund of knowledge may be visualized and a conceptual network into which the incomplete information supplied by a sentence can be mapped, thus making it…

Examines two texts showing that the relational propositions (frequently implicit) that arise out of a combination of independent clauses involve every clause and that they occur in a pattern of propositions that connects all of the clauses together. Shows how relational propositions are essential to the functioning of the text. (HTH)

The effects of organizational variables on recall of prose were examined in 48 college-educated adults in three age groups (20 to 33 years, 41 to 55 years, and 58 to 79 years). It was hypothesized that if older adults suffered deficits in organizational processes, they would show lower quantities of prose recall, difficulties in following the…

Describes a study contrasting hierarchical and causal approaches to story understanding indicating that when the number of causal connections increases, the likelihood of summarization for both goal and other statements increases. Suggests that the importance accorded to a statement in a story structure is the result of causal reasoning during…

SAM (Script Applier Mechanism), a computer program designed to understand stories that rely heavily on scripts (typical sequences of events in particular contexts), is described in this report. Chapter one, which discusses SAM's background, shows how causal chaining was developed to connect events in stories, presents a typical script, and…

Reaction time to reading sentences which were not clearly interrelated was longer when a paragraph was titled to give it to more discourse (paragraph) level meaning. The presence of titles had no effect on reaction times for meaningful paragraphs, however. (CP)

This paper discusses the parameters of discourse topic management in terms of a multidimensional model of topic coherence; interaction between these parameters and linguistic and cognitive knowledge; effects of discourse, linguistic, and cognitive level difficulties on topic parameters; a method of assessment across all parameters and knowledge…

This paper presents a passage written by a student and analyzes the way in which each sentence is or is not connected to those before it and after it, revealing the problems that cause the passage to lack coherence. The paper notes that, although this writer would have benefited from an opportunity to talk out her ideas (rather than a lesson in…

The most frequently noted difference in the abilities of tenth graders and college seniors to recall sentence connectives was the college students' ability to engage in free recall and rewriting, indicating that such a task would be a good predictor of mature use of transformational sentence connectives in the study of English. (JD)

The focus of this experiment was on the effects of associative strength on retention of connected discourse, in terms of both single words and strings of words. Also of interest was the short- and long-term retention of two types of information, verbatim and substance. Verbatim information covered words and word sequences identical to those in the…

Describes a question-answering procedure for probing the reader's internal representation of prose. Examines two dimensions of a reader's conceptual organization of plot: hierarchical level and relational density of propositions. (PMJ)

This article elaborates a model for understanding pedagogy in online educational forums. The model identifies four key components. Intellectual engagement describes the foreground cognitive processes of collaborative learning. Communication processes operating in the background accumulate an ever richer store of shared understandings that enable…