Abstract Coherence relations are expressed differently across languages, often leading to language learners misusing discourse connectives. We argue that the ability detect these errors crucially depends on coherence relation under scrutiny, as may remain unnoticed when is clause-internal and marked with a highly optional connective. focus, therefore, specifications, German-speaking sometimes s...

It is well-known that interpretation of a text requires understanding of its rhetorical relation hierarchy since discourse units rarely exist in isolation. Such discourse structure is fundamental to document-level applications, such as text understanding, summarization, knowledge extraction and question-answering. In comparison with English, there are only a few studies on Chinese discourse ana...


 This study examines the cognitive information processes that Turkish advanced non-native speakers of English employ in assigning referents this and reading production. We predicted these would assign relation to linear distance between discourse-linked anaphors their discourse (i.e., based on spatial-temporal features that), which means they prefer for a referent mentioned proximal chunk...

Abstract While there is a substantial amount of evidence for language processing being highly incremental and predictive process, we still know relatively little about how top-down discourse based expectations are combined with bottom-up information such as connectives. The present article reports on three experiments investigating this question using different methodologies (visual world parad...

Recognizing implicit discourse relations is a challenging but important task in the field of Natural Language Processing. For such a complex text processing task, different from previous studies, we argue that it is necessary to repeatedly read the arguments and dynamically exploit the efficient features useful for recognizing discourse relations. To mimic the repeated reading strategy, we prop...

In spite of their important quantitative role, discourse particles have so far been neglected in automatic speech processing for two reasons: Firstly it is not clear what they may contribute to the aims of automatic speech processing, and secondly their functions seem to vary so much that it seems difficult to identify the information relevant to such aims. The approach presented here therefore...

We measured eye movements as people read short stories. The target sentences contained noun/verb homographs (e.g. “duck”) and were preceded by a biasing context sentence. The homograph in the target sentence was always disambiguated by a case-marked pronoun: e.g., “She saw his/him duck.” Lexical bias effects (reflecting the relative frequency of the noun and verb forms) were found in the initia...

Previous research suggests that the right hemisphere (RH) may contribute uniquely to discourse and text processing by activating and maintaining a wide range of meanings, including more distantly related meanings. The present study used the word-lists false memory paradigm [Roediger, H. L., III, & McDermott, K. B. (1995). Creating false memories: Remembering words not presented in lists. Journa...

This study investigates whether prior knowledge affects the processing of vague discourse in Mandarin Chinese. Vague discourse refers to the texts using vague references and neutral descriptors (e.g. 東西 dōngxī "thing", 事情 shìqíng "item", and 物件 wùjiàn "object"), rather than naming the referred to items at the basic level. Three conditions of discourse were tested: one was vague texts preceded b...

T 009 port 970 Gib men Chr sis. //ww A Bola Cog 705 graphs (e.g., duck) and were preceded by a biasing context sentence. The homograph in the target sentence was always disambiguated by a case-marked pronoun, e.g., She saw his/him duck. Lexical bias effects (reflecting the relative frequency of the noun and verb forms) were found in the initial fixations on the homograph. In contrast, discourse...