Publications

Publication details [#45081]

Graesser, Arthur C., Moongee Jeon, Yan Yan and Zhiqiang Cai. 2007. Discourse cohesion in text and tutorial dialogue. Information Design Journal + Document Design 15 (3) : 199–213.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/idjdd

Annotation

Discourse cohesion is presumably an important facilitator of comprehension when individuals read texts and hold conversations. This study investigated components of cohesion and language in different types of discourse about Newtonian physics: A textbook, textoids written by experimental psychologists, naturalistic tutorial dialogue between expert human tutors and college students, and AutoTutor tutorial dialogue between a computer tutor and students (AutoTutor is an animated pedagogical agent that helps students learn about physics by holding conversations in natural language). This paper analyzed the four types of discourse with Coh-Metrix, a software tool that measures discourse on different components of cohesion, language, and readability. The cohesion indices included co-reference, syntactic and semantic similarity, causal cohesion, incidence of cohesion signals (e.g., connectives, logical operators), and many other measures. Cohesion data were quite similar for the two forms of discourse in expository monologue (textbooks and textoids) and for the two types of tutorial dialogue (i.e., students interacting with human tutors and AutoTutor), but very different between the discourse of expository monologue and tutorial dialogue. Coh-Metrix was also able to detect subtle differences in the language and discourse of AutoTutor versus human tutoring.