Connectives only facilitate the processing of more cognitively complex discourse relations

Abstract

Connectives have empirically been shown to facilitate discourse processing, creating expectations about upcoming discourse. It is also well established in the literature that some discourse relations are cognitively more complex, and involve more processing cost, than others. Whether the facilitating effect of connectives is equally found in more and less complex discourse relations is not clear in previous literature. This study investigates the cognitive cost of processing causal (less complex) and concessive (more complex) discourse relations with and without connectives in Spanish. The experiment compares the reading times of utterances in four conditions: causal without connective, concessive without connective, causal with connective and concessive with connective. The results show that the connective has a facilitating effect in the concession condition, but it makes no difference in the reading times of causal utterances. These results indicate that the facilitating effect of connectives depends on the intrinsic complexity of the discourse relation.