Spatial preposed adverbials as cohesive markers.

A challenge for psycholinguistics is to describe how linguistic cues influence the construction of the mental representation resulting from the comprehension of a text. In this study, we will focus on one of these linguistic devices: the sentence-initial positioning of spatial adverbials as "In the car parks...". Four self-paced reading experiments were conducted to test the Discourse Framing hypothesis according to which preposed adverbials can be seen as "frame builders" announcing that incoming contents satisfy a same informational criterion specified by the adverbial. Overall, our results confirmed that spatial adverbials do not play the same role when they are in sentence-initial and in sentence-final position. These results are discussed in the framework of the Zwaan's Event Indexing Model