Is causality processed faster than temporality? An experimental investigation of implicit and explicit relations in French Joanna Blochowiak, Cristina Grisot & Liesbeth Degand (Institut des Sciences Cognitives – Lyon, Université de Genève & Université catholique de Louvain) Keywords: causal relations, temporal relations, processing data, implicit and explicit marking, French Causal and temporal relations in discourse are ubiquitous. Their presence can be marked with lexical items sur as connectives (and, then, so or because) or left implicit. In this paper we seek to compare the cost of inferring the presence of causal vs temporal relations in the absence vs the presence of a connective indicative of a given relation. For the explicit marking, two types of connectives were tested – one specialized for each relation (donc for causality and puis for temporality) and one underspecified (et in its temporal and causal readings). Two views can be found in the literature concerning the treatment of discourse relations with and without connectives: (i) the Facilitator Connective hypothesis – the use of connective facilitates the access to the underlying relation (cf. Sanders & Noordman 2000, Canestrelli et al. 2013) and (ii) the Causality-by-default hypothesis – causal links are most salient to our cognition, therefore, they are easier to be processed (Sanders 2005). The Facilitator Connective hypothesis generates the prediction that the use of a connective would result in shorter reading times, at least for the specialized connectives, since they should give direct access to the relation they point to. The Causality-by-default hypothesis predicts that causal relations will be treated faster than temporal relations. To test these hypotheses, we carried out a self-paced reading experiment, in which we used a 2x3 within-group design, with two variables: Relation, with two levels (temporal and causal); and Marking, with three levels (conjunction (temporal et and causal et), adverbial (puis and donc) and implicit (temporal implicit and causal implicit)). A total of 47 participants (32 females, age range 19-25) fulfilled the reading task of 32 experimental items. Our results showed a discrepancy between forward causal and temporal relations regarding the role of connectives. For temporal relations, we observed the facilitating role of the specialised connective puis compared to the implicit marking (cf. Grisot & Blochowiak 2019 for concurring results) but not for the underspecified connective et. For causal relations, in contrast, both the specialised connective donc as well as the underspecified et had a facilitating role in the sentence processing. This seems to suggest that only specific connectives have a facilitating role, while underspecified connectives behave differently in the two types of relations. Our results do not confirm the Causality-by-default hypothesis as we found longer reading times with causal implicit relations than with temporal ones on the one hand, and again longer reading times with causal readings of et than with temporal readings of this underspecified connective. We explain these results within the Relevance Theory framework (Sperber & Wilson 1986, Noveck & Reboul 2008), according to which the calculation of pragmatic type of inferences (implicatures or explicatures) by the comprehender is a costly process (see Noveck & Reboul 2008 for an overview). With (implicit) temporal readings comprehenders have to infer only one (temporal) explicature while with the causal readings they have to infer two: the causal one and the temporal one which is necessarily present. References Canestrelli, A. R., Mak, W. M., & Sanders, T. J. (2013). Causal connectives in discourse processing: How differences in subjectivity are reflected in eye movements. Language and Cognitive Processes, 28(9), 1394–1413. Grisot C. & Blochowiak J. (2019) Verbal tenses and connectives as processing instructions: evidence from French. Pragmatics and Cognition 24(3): 404-440 Noveck, I. A., & Reboul, A. (2008). Experimental pragmatics: A Gricean turn in the study of language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12(11), 425–431. Sanders, T. (2005). Coherence, causality and cognitive complexity in discourse. Proceedings/Actes SEM-05, First International Symposium on the Exploration and Modelling of Meaning, 105–114. Sanders, T. J., & Noordman, L. G. (2000). The role of coherence relations and their linguistic markers in text processing. Discourse Processes, 29(1), 37–60. Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1986). Relevance: Communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.