Context and the Processing of Discourse: Priming and Genre Effects on Discourse Comprehension

Many theories of discourse structure rely on the idea that the segments comprising the discourse are linked through inferred relations such as causality and temporal contiguity. These theories suggest that all of the information needed to determine the relation can be found when the discourse is interpreted through the application of world knowledge. However, Sanders (1997) found that the interpretation of ambiguous relations can be affected by the discourse’s genre. Two experiments examine whether these genre effects are mediated through a cognitive process sensitive to nonlinguistic information. Experiment 1 shows that discourse relations are affected by repetition priming effects, while Experiment 2 suggests that the processing of discourse relations is sensitive to the expected frequency of the relations as exhibited in the text.