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When students read their school text, they may make a coherent mental representation of it that contains coherence relations between the text segments. The construction of such a representation is a prerequisite for learning from texts. This article focuses on the influence of connectives ("therefore," "furthermore") and layout (continuous placement of sentences vs. each sentence beginning a new line) on the dynamics of the reading process as well as the quality of students' mental representation. The results shed light on the cognitive reading processes of students in secondary education, which allows us to explain effects of text features on off-line comprehension measures. Our eye-tracking data emphasize the importance of connectives: Connectives speed up students' processing, especially when texts have a continuous layout. In contrast, students' processing slows when they read texts with a discontinuous layout. Our data also show a correlation between reading times and scores on bridging inference tasks: Students who read faster have higher comprehension scores. These findings indicate that explicit texts with a continuous layout place fewer processing demands on students' working memory.

In different countries, the use of pictorial information symbols to convey warnings and instructions is becoming more common. An important reason for this is that people from a variety of cultures can understand graphical symbols. However, symbols developed in one culture may not have the same meaning for people from other cultures. This study compared the comprehension of Dutch and Chinese participants of 30 pictorials from a series of "universal" disaster pictorials by Dutch designers. Participants completed a Web survey measuring comprehension levels and judgements of five design features (semantic closeness, familiarity, meaningfulness, simplicity and concreteness) of the pictorials. Furthermore, the effect of showing context pictures on comprehension was investigated. Dutch participants showed a better comprehension of the pictorials than Chinese, indicating that the designers probably used conventions more familiar to Dutch than to Chinese people. However, the relative comprehensibility of different pictorials was similar: generally, the same pictorials were easier or more difficult to understand for both groups. Photographs conveying context information improved comprehension levels for Dutch and Chinese participants. This kind of contrastive research is useful for exploring interpretation differences of pictorials intended for use in different cultures. (Contains 5 tables and 2 figures.)

Bilingual children with reduced exposure to one or both languages may have language profiles that are apparently similar to those of children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Children with DLD receive enough input, but have difficulty using this input for acquisition due to processing deficits. The present investigation aims to determine aspects of adjective production that are differentially affected by reduced input (in bilingualism) and reduced intake (in DLD). Adjectives were elicited from Dutch–Russian simultaneous bilinguals with limited exposure to Russian and Russian-speaking monolinguals with and without DLD. An antonym elicitation task was used to assess the size of adjective vocabularies, and a degree task was employed to compare the preferences of the three groups in the use of morphological, lexical, and syntactic degree markers. The results revealed that adjective–noun agreement is affected to the same extent by both reduced input and reduced intake. The size of adjective lexicons is also negatively affected by both, but more so by reduced exposure. However, production of morphological degree markers and learning of semantic paradigms are areas of relative strength in which bilinguals outperform monolingual children with DLD. We suggest that reduced input might be counterbalanced by linguistic and cognitive advantages of bilingualism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the processing of causality has shown that causally related sentences lead to faster reading, better recall, and better comprehension than sentences that are not causally related. In this study, we investigate two ways in which causality can influence processing: through the expectation that readers may have of a causal relation and the ease with which the sentences can be related in a causal way on the basis of their content. We ran two eye tracking experiments to investigate the online effects of these factors. In the experiments we looked at the influence of these factors on the process of establishing referential and relational coherence. Experiment 1 shows that immediate effects of causal relatedness on referential processing occur even with a connective that is not explicitly causal (when). Moreover, the results show that the early effect only occurs when readers expect a causal relation. Experiment 1 also shows that causal expectations facilitate the processing of causally related sentences. Experiment 2 shows that this is only the case when the content of the second clause actually allows a causal interpretation. The data show that causal expectations have differential effects on the processing of referential and relational coherence. Referential coherence is influenced proactively by the focusing of one of the referents in the context. Relational coherence, on the other hand, is influenced retroactively: only when there turns out to be a causal link between the sentences is processing facilitated by causal expectation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Causal connectives are often considered to provide crucial information about the discourse structure; they signal a causal relation between two text segments. However, in many languages of the world causal connectives specialise in either subjective or objective causal relations. We investigate whether this type of (discourse) information is used during the online processing of causal connectives by focusing on the Dutch connectiveswantandomdat, both translated bybecause. In three eye-tracking studies we demonstrate that the Dutch connectivewant, which is a prototypical marker of subjective CLAIM–ARGUMENT relations, leads to an immediate processing disadvantage compared toomdat, a prototypical marker of objective CONSEQUENCE–CAUSE relations. This effect was observed at the words immediately following the connective, at which point readers cannot yet establish the causal relation on the basis of the content, which means that the effect is solely induced by the connectives. In Experiment 2 we demonstrate that this effect is related to the representation of the first clause of awantrelation as a mental state. In Experiment 3, we show that the use ofomdatin relations that do not allow for a CONSEQUENCE–CAUSE interpretation leads to serious processing difficulties at the end of those relations. On the basis of these results, we argue thatwanttriggers a subjective mental state interpretation of S1, whereasomdattriggers the construction of an objective CONSEQUENCE–CAUSE relation. These results illustrate that causal connectives provide subtle information about semantic-pragmatic distinctions between types of causal relations, which immediately influences online processing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]