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While corpus studies have shown that discourse connectives that convey the same coherence relation can display subtle differences, research on online discourse processing has only focused on a rather limited set of connectives. Yet, different connectives - for example, rare or polyfunctional ones - might elicit different reading patterns. In order to explore this assumption, we test the robustness of discourse processing for French native speakers by measuring the way they process causal and concessive sentences that are conveyed by either an appropriate or inappropriate connective. Throughout three experiments, we change important characteristics of the connectives: we first test frequently used connectives (Experiment 1), secondly less frequent ones (Experiment 2), and finally less frequent connectives that are polyfunctional and for which different functions clearly compete (Experiment 3). Our results show that the processing for incoherent items was affected for all connectives, however readers showed altered reading fluency when infrequent connectives were used. We conclude that discourse processing is quite robust and that readers are able to insert meaning conveyed by rare connectives while still showing the highest reading ease with frequent connectives., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Wetzel, Zufferey and Gygax.)

Discourse connectives are lexical items like "but" and "so" that are well-known to influence the online processing of the discourse relations they convey. Yet, discourse relations like causality or contrast can also be signaled by other means than connectives, such as syntactic structures. So far, the influence of these alternative signals for discourse processing has been comparatively under-researched. In particular, their processing in a second language remains entirely unexplored. In a series of three self-paced reading experiments, we compare the reading patterns of contrastive relations by native French-speakers and non-native speakers of French with English as a first language. We focus on the effect of syntactic parallelism and how it interacts with different types of connectives. We test whether native and non-native readers equally recruit parallelism to process contrast in combination with or without a connective (Experiment 1), with a frequent vs. infrequent connective (Experiment 2) and with an ambiguous vs. unambiguous connective (Experiment 3), thus varying the explicitness and ease of retrieval of the contrast relation. Our results indicate that parallelism plays an important role for both groups of readers, but that it is a more prominent cue for non-native speakers, while its effect is modulated by task difficulty for native participants., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2021 Crible, Wetzel and Zufferey.)