Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Causality plays an important role in giving discourse its characteristic coherence. This paper examines how causality implicit in an utterance helps to organize dynamically constructed mental models of discourse. Experiments are reported suggesting that the linguistic form of utterances contributes significant semantic information about causality to a discourse representation. This view is contrasted with competing claims in the literature that causality only emerges from social psychological inferences or optional inferences on background knowledge.