Discourse Processing: Semantic relations, reader expectations, and mental models

Abstract

Many psycholinguistic studies analyze processing costs in relation to the expectations of the reader during the text reading and comprehension processes, and their association with some semantic relations. Although few studies have investigated this phenomenon in discourse production, the evidence indicates that it is possible to make predictions about comprehension similar to those already existing. This paper describes an experiment that, through a verbal completion task (cloze paradigm), allows inferring the progressive organization of a mental model as an abstract representation of the text. We used four core variables: type of semantic relationship, completion instance, conceptual dimension, and presence / absence of a connective particle. Our data support the approaches suggesting that causal expectations are drivers in processing, and also show specificities relating to the underlying process (comprehension vs. production), as well as mechanisms common to both. We believe this study has possibilities for transfer, and its results can be projected to various linguistic and cognitive (sub)disciplines, from basic psychology to clinical or educational fields.