Discourse Connectives give Rise to Lexical Predictions

A large number of experiments reveals that language comprehension is generally incremental and even predictive (e.g., Tanenhaus & Trueswell, 1995). However, there is also evidence that incoming information across the sentence level does not always immediately update local predictions and affect global interpretation (Sanford & Garrod, 1998). The question therefore is which information from the discourse is considered, and how much and how fast it affects comprehension and active predictions by the comprehender. We report two studies which test whether discourse connectors are integrated quickly enough online to give rise to predictions, and in particular whether a concessive discourse connector leads to different predictions than a causal one. Comparing causal connectors (e.g., therefore) versus concessive connectors (e.g., however) is particularly interesting, because concessives have sometimes be referred to as “negative causals” (König & Siemund, 2000). Processing concessives (compared to causals) may resemble processing negation, leading to a delay in processing (e.g., Carpenter & Just, 1975) and giving rise to a search for alternatives (Kaup et al., 2006).