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Category: Project

Description: Existing literature shows that readers and listeners rapidly adjust their expectations about likely discourse continuations through discourse markers, as well as through other narrow linguistic and discourse contextual cues. However, it is unclear whether (i) the facilitative effects of various linguistic cues differ in quality and (ii) whether the effects interact with one another in any principled manner. We conducted two self-paced reading experiments on concessive constructions in German and English wherein optional lexical and/or contextual cues appeared ahead of a concessive discourse connective. The results demonstrate that readers can use both types of cues to anticipate the upcoming connective. Thus, our study provides novel evidence for expectation-driven accounts of discourse processing and elucidates the functions of discourse signals. Furthermore, the results also show that the role a type of cue plays may be subject to cross-linguistic variation.