Schizophrenic discourse is characterized by thought disorder, or a lack of coherence, prompting substantial research into identifying and measuring the incoherent discourse of schizophrenics. Much of this research has examined short extracts of elicited spoken data and used researcher judgments. This study examines the connectedness of…

Background: Despite its importance, in-depth analysis of connected speech is often neglected in the diagnosis of primary progressive aphasia (PPA) -- especially for the logopenic variant (lvPPA) for which unreliable differential diagnosis has been documented. Only a few studies have been conducted on this topic in lvPPA. Aims: The aim of this…

Ambiguity in discourse is pervasive, yet mechanisms of production and processing suggest that it tends to be compensated in context. The present study sets out to analyze the combination of discourse markers (such as "but" or "moreover") with other discourse signals (such as semantic relations or punctuation marks) across three…

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…

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the Ewe language realizes cohesion by means of conjunctions in comparison with English as well as the similarities and differences in the way the two languages realize cohesion in this regard. The findings revealed that both English and Ewe realize cohesion by conjunction almost the same way. The…

Previous research on reference tracking has revealed a tendency towards over-explicitness in second language (L2) learners. Only limited evidence exists that this trend extends to situations where the learner's first and second languages do not share a sensory-motor modality. Using a story-telling paradigm, this study examined how hearing novice…

This paper deals with the use of participial constructions in Hindi as discourse strategies for cohesion in speech. The data from the "Analyzing Narratives" project indicates that participial constructions are used fairly extensively as discourse connectors. The conjunctive participle is used more extensively than the others. Some of the major…

Studies the kinds of errors made by American learners of Russian, the reasons for these errors, change in error patterns, and resemblance between the errors of foreign and primary language learners. (42 references) (CK)