Connectives and Causal Relatedness in Expository Text

The combined influence of causal connectives and varying levels of causal relatedness on online and offline comprehension of expository texts was investigated. The current hypothesis was that causal connectives would encourage elaborative processing and online generation of bridging inferences, particularly in the moderately to low causally related sentence pairs. This was predicted because past research has noted causal connectives capacity to elicit generation of inferences online. Connectives were not predicted to encourage inference generation in the higher-related items because the causal bridging inference should be obvious to the reader. To test this, a new set of 24 expository items was generated with four versions of each item representing varying levels of causal relatedness. Results show little evidence supporting the hypotheses. To account for the null findings, the potential difficulty and participants lack of familiarity with the text content are discussed as factors. Suggestions for future research are presented.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science in Experimental Psychology (M.S.)

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis (open access)

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Department of Psychology

Year dc:date.available

2005

Author dc:creator

• Simpkins, Benjamin G.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Janice N. Steirn
• Daniel Webster

• ETD
• Discourse Processing
• Connectives
• Conjunctions
• Causality
• Causal Relatedness
• Bridging Inferences
• Elaborative Inferences
• Local Coherence
• Expository Text
• Discourse markers
• English language
• Causative

Repository record dc:identifier

https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/etd/450

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu:etd-1450