Agenda
Merel Scholman: Individual differences in connective comprehension: The effect of linguistic experience and general reasoning skills
Merel Scholman: Individual differences in connective comprehension: The effect of linguistic experience and general reasoning skills
The comprehension of connectives is crucial for understanding the discourse relations that make up a text. We studied connective comprehension in English to investigate whether adult comprehenders acquire the meaning and intended use of connectives to a similar extent, and how connective features and individual differences impact connective comprehension.
A coherence judgment study (n=266, recruited via Prolific) showed that differences in how well people comprehend connectives depend on the lexical transparency but not on the written frequency of the connective. Furthermore, individual variation between participants can be explained by their vocabulary size, non-verbal IQ, and cognitive reasoning style. Print exposure was not found to be relevant.
These findings provide further insight into the factors that influence discourse processing, and highlight the need to consider individual differences in discourse comprehension research, as well as the need to examine a wider range of connectives in studies of discourse markers.
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