The time-course of processing discourse connectives

While there is some evidence that causal discourse relations are processed incrementally, the time-course of comprehending concessive discourse markers (e.g., nevertheless) has hardly been investigated. Given that concessives are often defined as negative causals, there may be similarities between the processing of concessives and negations (e.g., a delay). This paper investigates the time-course of processing causal versus concessive discourse markers in German within both a visual-world experiment and a reading experiment. We find that while concessive discourse markers can be processed rapidly if the context is constraining enough, there is a delay compared to causal contexts.