title: Anticipatory looks reveal expectations about discourse relations.
abstract: Previous research provides evidence for expectation-driven processing within sentences at phonological, lexical, and syntactic levels of linguistic structure. Less well-established is whether comprehenders also anticipate pragmatic relationships between sentences. To address this, we evaluate a unit of discourse structure that comprehenders must infer to hold between sentences in order for a discourse to make sense-the intersentential coherence relation. In a novel eyetracking paradigm, we trained participants to associate particular spatial locations with particular coherence relations. Experiment 1 shows that the subset of listeners who successfully acquired the location∼relation mappings during training subsequently looked to these locations during testing in response to a coherence-signaling intersentential connective. Experiment 2 finds that listeners' looks during sentences containing coherence-biasing verbs reveal expectations about upcoming sentence types. This work extends existing research on prediction beyond sentence-internal structure and provides a new methodology for examining the cues that comprehenders use to establish relationships at the discourse level.
authors.affiliation: University of Edinburgh, Department of Linguistics & English Language, Edinburgh, UK. Electronic address: Hannah.Rohde@ed.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Hannah
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Rohde
authors.affiliation: Northwestern University, Department of Psychology, Evanston, IL, USA.
authors.forename: William S
authors.initials: WS
authors.lastname: Horton
mesh_terms: D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology; D005133:Eye Movements / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology
keywords: Coherence relations; Discourse comprehension; Eye tracking; Implicit causality