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,…

The employment of genre-based pedagogy and Task-Based Language Teaching in second language education is representative of a paradigmatic shift towards a focus on meaning-making. Despite this shift, second language acquisition (SLA) research continues to predominantly rely on complexity, accuracy, and fluency metrics to assess learner production…

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…

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…

When communicating with their interlocutors, adults have a robust preference to order previously mentioned ("old") referents in the discourse before mentioning referents that have not yet been introduced in the discourse ("new"). But in an experimental study investigating phrasal conjuncts, 3- to 5-year-olds acquiring German…

Discusses the ways languages of Europe render the "given"-"new" distinction on the basis of data collected by means of presenting speakers of various languages with the task of reconstructing a route on a map. The article raises questions about the nature of "wh"-pronouns in English and about what is shared by these…