UC San Diego

This dissertation provides a psycholinguistic investigation of the influence of discourse on language comprehension. It examines factors that allow comprehenders to follow a discourse, to form representations of the events being described, and to make predictions about how subsequent utterances will relate to prior linguistic material. Previous work has recognized the importance of prediction in sentence-internal processing: transition probabilities at the phonemic level, semantic associations in lexical access, and structural frequencies at the syntactic level. The work presented here investigates whether learnable statistical regularities also exist at the discourse level, a topic that has remained largely unexplored in the psycholinguistics literature. The dissertation presents a series of experiments testing the extent to which comprehenders use various pragmatic cues to make predictions about how a discourse will be continued. In order to quantify discourse-level information, the experiments use an inventory of coherence relations adopted from the theoretical linguistics and artificial intelligence literatures. The experimental results demonstrate that comprehenders do indeed make use of available pragmatic cues to generate expectations about upcoming coherence relations. Furthermore, the results show that the mechanisms for establishing coherence relations can inform our understanding of two well studied sentence-internal phenomena: coreference and syntactic ambiguity. The online results establish the importance of these pragmatic cues in comprehenders incremental sentence processing. The coherence-based approach taken here provides a lens through which to view previous results in the domains of both coreference and syntactic ambiguity. The fact that phenomena in both these domains appear to be sensitive to coherence-driven biases suggests that these biases may be more pervasive than has been previously acknowledged. This work indicates that future processing models of sentence and discourse processing must take into account effects that emerge from discourse coherence