Research on causal relations in multisemiotic texts constituted by words and graphs has been scarce with only a few exceptions. In the current study, eye movement behavior was studied in seventy-six Chilean high school students, who read a set of twelve causally-related economics texts in Spanish in four experimental conditions. The objective is twofold. We aimed, on the one hand, to observe the main effects of the causal discourse marker (DM) por tanto and the statistical causal graph (G), as well as the interaction effect of both variables on different eye tracking measures. On the other, we seek to observe the effects of the DM on the same eye tracking measures for the graph system (GS) area of interest (AOI). The findings showed that the conjoint presence of the DM and the G did not positively influence the processing of selected AOIs. Analyses also reveal no significant effects on the GS AOI. Thus, the results indicate that the DM tend to decrease processing times, while the G increases them. Additional analyses conducted on the integrative transitions between the verbal system and the graph system reveal that more transitions were identified between the consequence segment and the graph system, thereby confirming that the consequence segment is crucial for the integration of both semiotic systems.
Focus particles have been one of the spotlights of linguistic research during the last fifty years. They have been studied mainly from a syntactic and semantic perspective, in formal and functional approaches. However, in the last years new insights in this field have been developed through pragmatic and textual approaches. From that perspective, focus particles can be considered as a type of discourse particles, as far as their semantic nature and their pragmatic function are concerned. In this paper, we claim that experiments on text processing may help to support this view: by analyzing eye movements during reading and by testing the effective comprehension of utterances, we can demonstrate the key role of the Spanish scalar additive particle incluso ('even') in the process of information retrieval.
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