Not too early, not too late: the construction of coherence in the comprehension process

Max Louwerse

Most theories of text comprehension assume that comprehenders build a coherent mental representation of events whose relationships are cued by cohesive linguistic devices in a text. But where does the construction of coherence take place in the comprehension process? It is proposed that the answers to these questions depend on the TYPE and POLARITY of cohesive expressions. TYPE contains the categories CAUSAL, TEMPORAL and ADDITIVE; POLARITY contains the categories POSITIVE and NEGATIVE. POSITIVE relations extend, while NEGATIVE relations cease to extend the situation expressed by the preceding/succeeding clause. TYPE relations refer to time and causality (CAUSAL); time only (TEMPORAL), or neither (ADDITIVE). The factorial combination of TYPE and POLARITY offers six kinds of coherence relations.

Several studies have investigated how textual cohesion supports representational coherence for these relations. However, the problem with many of these studies is that the materials are biased towards a particular type of coherence. Hence, we need texts that do not bias the comprehender in establishing a coherence relation. In a series of experiments I found that ADDITIVE relations induced an incremental comprehension process, because comprehenders need information from the text to specify the coherence relation to establish. CAUSAL relations, being more specific than ADDITIVE relations, are processed faster towards the beginning but not toward the end of the clause, with TEMPORAL relations in between. The experiment provides cognitive evidence for the proposed types of coherence relations and for a set of processes based on these types.