Resumen de Connectives only facilitate the processing of morecognitively complex discourse relations

Assela Reig Alamillo, Samantha Aragón Gutiérrez

• Empirical studies have shown that connectives facilitate discourse processing by creating expectations about the upcoming discourse. It is also well established in the literature that some discourse relations are more cognitively complex and involve greater processing costs than others. However, it is unclear from previous literature whether the facilitating effect of connectives is equally evident in both more and less complex discourse relations. This study investigates the cognitive cost of processing causal (less complex) and concessive (more complex) discourse relations with and without connectives in Spanish. The experiment compares the reading times of utterances in four conditions: causal without connective, concessive without connective, causal with connective and concessive with connective. The results show that the connective has a facilitating effect in the concession condition, but it makes no difference in the reading times of causal utterances. These results indicate that the facilitating effect of connectives depends on the intrinsic complexity of the discourse relation.