Connectives as Processing Signals: How Students Benefit in Processing Narrative and Expository Texts

Abstract

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.

The role of knowledge of connectives in comprehension of a German narrative text

“…Richter & Christmann, 2002). Other processes are hierarchically more complex, such as the process of linking several propositions with each other, that is, establishing global coherence, and integrating them into one's prior knowledge to form an accurate situation model or mental model (Johnson-Laird, 1983;Kintsch, 1988;Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978;van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983). Connectives, also referred to as discourse markers, explicitly indicate the way in which individual segments of sentences or texts are to be semantically connected, for example, cause-effect relations (Breindl, Volodina, & Waßner, 2014;Halliday & Hasan, 1976;Pasch, Brauße, Breindl, & Waßner, 2003).…”

Cognitive complexity and the linguistic marking of coherence relations: A parallel corpus study

“…The question of when a coherence relation has to be explicitly marked in order to avoid a loss of coherence is an important issue within the study of discourse, but it is relevant to other fields as well. For instance, whether or not coherence relations are explicitly marked has been found to influence the processing and comprehension of educational texts (e.g., McNamara et al, 1996;van Silfhout et al, 2015). In addition, learning to appropriately mark coherence relations is a vital but difficult aspect of acquiring a second language, with L2 speakers regularly over-and underusing connectives, using them in non-prototypical constructions and contexts, and not always understanding when relations should be marked explicitly (e.g., Granger and Tyson, 1996;Müller, 2005;Zufferey and Gygax, 2017).…”

Eficacia del programa “Lee Comprensivamente” para la enseñanza de estrategias de comprensión lectora en estudiantes de Educación Primaria

“…El puntaje máximo de la prueba es de 60 puntos. Los estudios para la adaptación argentina mostraron evidencias satisfactorias de fiabilidad (α = .90) y de validez estructural como componente del índice de comprensión verbal (Taborda et al, 2010).…”