Studies in several languages find that causal connectives differ from one another in their prototypical meaning and use, which provides insight into language users’ cognitive categorization of causal relations in discourse. Subjectivity plays a vital role in this process. Using an integrated… read more
Educational publishers often make their expository texts more vivid, by making them emotionally interesting, concrete and imagery-provoking, and proximate in a sensory, temporal, or spatial way. Previous studies have found mixed results regarding the effects of vividness on the attractiveness,… read more
Cognitively oriented linguists have various linguistic resources at their disposal, and therefore need to develop methodological strategies of when to use which method. This chapter illustrates the benefits of using converging evidence. We review research results from several methodologies,… read more
Connectives and cue phrases are the most prototypical linguistic elements that signal coherence relations, but by limiting our attention to connectives, we are likely missing out on important other cues readers and listeners use when establishing coherence relations. However, defining the role… read more
Causal relations between sentences differ in terms of subjectivity: they can be objective (based on facts) or subjective (based on reasoning). Subjective relations lead to longer reading times than objective relations. Causal connectives differ in the degree to which they encode this… read more
We report a series of longitudinal studies on children’s acquisition of Dutch,
English and German causal connectives supporting a model in which children’s
cognitive development, parental input and the cognitive complexity of different
types of causality are brought into a systematic… read more
This article focuses on the influence of connectives (because, so) and layout (continuous placement of sentences versus each sentence beginning on a new line) on the quality of students’ mental representations. By using multiple comprehension tasks, we found that cohesive text features have… read more
Recent corpus studies have shown that differences in subjectivity − the degree to which speakers express themselves in an utterance − can account for the usage of causal connectives (because, so) in major European languages. If the notion of subjectivity is a basic cognitive principle, it ought to… read more
The connectives daardoor (as a result) and dus (so) can both mark forward causality in Dutch. However, they differ in specificity and subjectivity. Daardoor gives the reader a very specific instruction, since it can only mark objective cause/effect relations. Dus can not only mark subjective… read more
The importance of the discourse level for the study of language and linguistics can hardly be overestimated. The study of text and discourse has become an increasingly important area over the last decades, both in linguistics and in psychology. In this paper we report on experiments which add to… read more
This study examines whether writers vary how they write under influence of the changing task situation when writing in a second language (L2) and, if so, whether differences in the way they write are related to variations in text quality. Twenty first year students wrote four texts each in their L2… read more
Linguists have distinguished between various types of causal relations. For instance, Pander Maat & Sanders (2000; 2001) distinguish between different kinds of causal relations: objective and subjective causal relations. A connective provides explicit processing instructions on how the first… read more
Text coherence can be marked linguistically by using connectives and lexical signals that make coherence relations explicit. This study focuses on the influence of such markers on text comprehension in ecologically valid contexts. A first experiment shows how readers in a business meeting and in a… read more
What is it that makes a text a good text? The answer to this question is of vital concern to education in writing. Evaluation of children's texts requires explicit and well-founded criteria for text quality. In this article it is argued that text structure should be considered as an important… read more