Before they are three years old, most children have started to build coherent discourse. This article focuses on one important linguistic device children have to learn: connectives. The main questions are: Do connectives emerge in a fixed order? And if so, how can this order be explained? In line with Bloom et al. (1980) we propose to explain similarities in the development in terms of cumulative cognitive complexity: complex relations are acquired later than simple ones. Following a cognitive approach to coherence relations, we expect positive relations to be acquired before negatives and additives before temporals and causals. We develop a multidimensional approach to the acquisition process in order to account for the variation among children. Hypotheses were tested by analyzing data from children aged 1 ; 5-5 ; 6 on the emergence of Dutch connectives. The multidimensional approach of cognitive complexity describes both the uniformity and the diversity in the developmental sequences of Dutch-speaking and English-speaking children.

Many young readers fail to construct a proper mental text representation, often due to a lack of higher-order skills such as making integrative and inferential links. In an eye-tracking experiment among 141 Dutch eighth graders, we tested whether coherence markers (moreover, after, because) improve students' online processing and their off-line comprehension of narrative and expository texts. Eye-tracking results show that connectives lead to faster processing of subsequent information as well as shorter rereading times of previous text information. Connectives also trigger readers to make regressions to preceding information. These findings indicate that connectives function as immediate "processing instructions." Furthermore, all students performed better on local comprehension tasks (i.e., bridging inference questions) after reading texts containing connectives than after reading texts without these markers. These findings apply to both text types and to all students, regardless of reading proficiency. This study highlights the importance of comprehensible texts in which implicit coherence relations are avoided.

Coherence relations can be made linguistically explicit by means of connectives (e.g., but, because) or cue phrases (e.g., on the other hand, which is why), but can also be left implicit and conveyed through the juxtaposition of two clauses or sentences. However, it seems that not all relations are equally easy to reconstruct when they are implicit. In this paper, we explore which features of coherence relations make them more, or less, likely to be conveyed implicitly. We adopt the assumption that expected relations are more often implicit than relations that are not expected, and propose to determine a relation's expectedness using the notion of cognitive complexity. We test our hypotheses by means of a parallel corpus study, in which we analyze the translations of explicit English coherence relations from the Europarl Direct corpus into four target languages: Dutch, German, French, and Spanish. We find that cognitive complexity indeed influences the linguistic marking of coherence relations, and that this does not vary between the languages in our corpus. In addition, we find that a relation's relational and syntactic dependency also influences its linguistic marking, but that these measures are not completely independent of relation type.

Recent corpus studies have shown that differences in subjectivity − the degree to which speakers express themselves in an utterance − can account for the usage of causal connectives (because, so) in major European languages. If the notion of subjectivity is a basic cognitive principle, it ought to play a role in the description of connectives in other languages. In this paper, we present a corpus analysis of five Mandarin result connectives, kĕjiàn, suŏyĭ, yīncĭ, yīn'ér, and yúshì. We used four subjectivity indicators: modality, domain (following Sweetser 1990), and the presence and identity of a Subject of Consciousness -the person responsible for constructing the causal relation. Results show that kĕjiàn, suŏyĭ, yīncĭ, yīn'ér, and yúshì display different degrees of subjectivity. To a large degree, our findings corroborate previous observations in the literature (e.g. the ones in Xing 2001).However, our analysis also shows that while kĕjiàn, yúshì, and yīn'ér have robust profiles across genres, the subjective meanings of suŏyĭ and yīncĭ, two common connectors, are genre sensitive.

In this paper, we show how three often used and seemingly different discourse annotation frameworks – Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB), Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), and Segmented Discourse Representation Theory – can be related by using a set of unifying dimensions. These dimensions are taken from the Cognitive approach to Coherence Relations and combined with more fine-grained additional features from the frameworks themselves to yield a posited set of dimensions that can successfully map three frameworks. The resulting interface will allow researchers to find identical or at least closely related relations within sets of annotated corpora, even if they are annotated within different frameworks. Furthermore, we tested our unified dimension (UniDim) approach by comparing PDTB and RST annotations of identical newspaper texts and converting their original end label annotations of relations into the accompanying values per dimension. Subsequently, rates of overlap in the attributed values per dimension were analyzed. Results indicate that the proposed dimensions indeed create an interface that makes existing annotation systems “talk to each other.”