From cohesion in text to coherence in comprehension

Text comprehension involves the construction of a coherent mental representation of the situations cohesively described by the text. We use the term 'coherence' for these representational relationships and 'cohesion' for the textual indications that coherent representations should be built. Cohesion can be indicated by lexical information (vocabulary-driven) or by grammatical information (grammar-driven). In either case, five types of coherence can result: REFERENTIAL, LOCATIONAL, CAUSAL, TEMPORAL and ADDITIVE strands, corresponding to identification of the who, where, why, when and what. This thesis asks how textual cohesion supports representational coherence, by addressing two research questions: 1. To what extent is each of the types of cohesion independent of the others in its effects on the reader? 2. Does coherence develop (on-line) throughout the comprehension process, does it come about (off-line) in a final wrappmg-up stage of the comprehension process or both? To explore effects of vocabulary-driven cohesion on coherence, a connectionist model is used. Vocabulary-driven cohesion is represented as a large number of weighted relations between the elements of the situations described by the text. A series of computational experiments measure the effects of vocabulary-driven cohesion on summary and data. The results show that vocabulary-driven cohesion relations both interact and make independent contributions to coherence. They also show that the more specific a situation is, the more likely it is the situation is summarised. The effects of grammar-driven cohesion are explored in two stages. First, a parametensation of local grammar-driven cohesion and coherence relations is developed, using the categories TYPE (CAUSAL, TEMPORAL, ADDITIVE) and POLARITY (POSITIVE, NEGATIVE). It is assumed that these relations are processed by combinations of parameters. A series of reading time experiments test the role of these parameters in the comprehension process. Those cohesion relations that are less specific direct resources to cohesion-based information in the text and support an incrementalcoherence hypothesis, whereas more specific relations direct resources to coherencebased information and support a delayed-coherence hypothesis.

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