The Locus of Implicit Causality Effects in Comprehension

Abstract

Implicit causality might enable readers to focus on the imputed cause of an event and make it the default referent of a following pronoun. Alternatively, its effects might arise only when a following explicit cause is integrated with a description of the event. In three probe recognition experiments, in which the participants in the events were of the same sex, the only reliable effect -apart from the advantage of first mention -was that of whether implicit and explicit causes were the same. This effect was independent of whether the probe named the referent of the pronoun. In a fourth experiment, in which the two participants were of different sexes, there was no simple effect of implicit causality, but there was an advantage for the pronoun's referent. These results are consistent with the view that implicit causality has its effects at integration. We discuss their broader implications for theories of comprehension.There is a growing consensus that mental representations of the content of text take the form of discourse models (e.g., Garnham, 1981Garnham, , 1987Johnson-Laird & Garnham, 1980;Greene, McKoon, & Ratcliff, 1992;Stenning, 1978;Webber, 1979) and that the primary goal of a theory of text comprehension is to specify the nature of such models and of the processes that construct them. Discourse models contain representations of people, things, events (in the broad sense of that term used in semantic theory; see e.g., Frawley, 1992, in which it covers acts, actions, states, and processes), and so on, in the real, or an imaginary, world. However, beyond this basic specification, there is considerable disagreement about their nature and about the mental processes that build them. One important issue is the extent to which discourse models are elaborated using information that is not explicit in a text, but which must be derived inferentially (see e.g., , vs Garnham, 1992, and Glenberg & Mathew, 1992. Another set of issues, and one that has received less attention in the psychological literature, concerns the internal structure of discourse models. These issues, which can loosely be dubbed "issues-of focus," are crucial to online theories Address correspondence and reprint requests to Alan Garnham, Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9QG, United Kingdom. Tele-phone: +44 1273 678337. Fax: +44 1273 678611. alang@epunix.sussex.ac.uk. HHS Public Access Author Manuscript Author ManuscriptAuthor ManuscriptAuthor Manuscript of text comprehension, because the internal structure of discourse models determines which parts of those models are most available in memory. It is one of these issues that we address in this paper.Some of the things mentioned in a text are in focus and, therefore, readily available for later reference, and others are not. Both local, sentence level, and global, discourse level, mechanisms may contribute to whether an item is in focus and hence can readily be referred to again (e.g., using a pronoun). However, the details of these mechanisms rema...

Establishing reference in language comprehension: An electrophysiological perspective

“…Because the problem hinged on the implicit causality conveyed by a preceding interpersonal verb, the effect also unequivocally demonstrates that readers make immediate use of this type of semantic information. Our ERP results therefore straightforwardly disconfirm the Clausal Integration theory of how people use verb-based implicit causality information (e.g., Garnham, 2000;Garnham et al, 1996;Stewart et al, 2000), and they instead support an account in which implicit causality can immediately foreground one of two referents at the expense of the other (e.g., Immediate Focusing theory; Greene and McKoon, 1995;Long and De Ley, 2000;McKoon et al, 1993). The present ERP results converge with the behavioral observation that readers slow down at or immediately after bias-inconsistent pronouns (established in self-paced reading as well as eye tracking; Koornneef and Van Berkum, 2006).…”

“…In particular, whereas a bias-consistent pronoun (in this case, "she") should be resolved more easily, the resolution of a bias-inconsistent one ("he") should be more difficult. However, the Immediate Focusing theory and the empirical data upon which it is based have been called into question by proponents of the Clausal Integration theory (e.g., Garnham, 2000;Garnham et al, 1996;Stewart et al, 2000). According to the latter, the information supplied by an implicit causality verb is brought to bear on comprehension towards the end of the sentence only, when people have read the main clause as well as the subordinate because-clause and subsequently combine the causal information provided by both clauses into a single representation.…”

Normative study of the implicit causality of 100 interpersonal verbs in Spanish

“…The theory of focus suggests that implicit causality has an online effect, where the causal information from the verb is used immediately to interpret the referential pronoun in the second clause (e.g., McDonald & MacWhinney, 1995;McKoon et al, 1993;Rinck & Bower, 1995;Stewart et al, 2000). The theory of integration suggests that the effect of implicit causality does not occur until the information from the second clause has been integrated-that is, until the second clause has been read completely (e.g., Garnham, Traxler, Oakhill, & Gernsbacher, 1996;Stewart et al, 2000). However, these theories are not sufficient, and a complete explanation of this effect requires a more extensive theory.…”

Verb argument structure predicts implicit causality: The advantages of finer-grained semantics

“…The phenomenon has been used to probe the development of causal schemas in children (Au, 1986;Corrigan & Stevenson, 1994), the stability of these schemas across cultures (Brown & Fish, 1983b), and the conceptualization of social relationships and dominance hierarchies (Corrigan, 2001;LaFrance, Brownell, & Hahn, 1997;Maass, Salvi, Arcuri, & Gun Semin, 1989;Mannetti & De Grada, 1991). Psycholinguists have used IC as a test case for studying the interplay of bottom--up and top--down processing in language comprehension (Featherstone & Sturt, 2010;Garnham, Traxler, Oakhill, & Gernsbacher, 1996;Greene & McKoon, 1995;Guerry, Gimenes, Caplan, & Rigalleau, 2006;Koornneef & Van Berkum, 2006;Long & De Ley, 2000;McDonald & MacWhinney, 1995;McKoon, Greene, & Ratcliff, 1993;Shen & Yang, 2006;Stewart, Pickering, & Sanford, 2000;) and the developmental origins of these processes (Pyykkonen, Matthews, & Jarvikivi, 2010). While some of these researchers have approached IC as an isolated phenomenon, others have addressed it as part of a broader theory of discourse coherence, treating it as a specific example of how the interpretation of one sentence is constrained by its relation to other sentences in the discourse (Frank, Koppen, Noordman, & Vonk, 2007;Kehler, Kertz, Rohde, & Elman, 2008;Crinean & Garnham, 2006;Ehrlich, 1980;Pickering & Majid, 2007;Stewart, Pickering, & Sanford, 1998).…”