Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Many theories of discourse structure rely on the idea that the segments comprising the discourse are linked through inferredrelations such as causality and temporal contiguity. These theories often suggest that the information needed to determinethe relation can be found when the discourse is interpreted through the application of world knowledge. However, Sanders(1997) found that the interpretation of ambiguous relations can be affected by the discourses genre. Similarly, Sagi (2006)reported that participants were faster to interpret discourse relations when they were preceded by the same discourserelation. The present study demonstrates that exposure to discourse relations such as result (e.g., John passed Mark ina marathon. He won.) or explanation (e.g., John ... He was in great shape.) can affect the interpretation of subsequentambiguous relations encountered in an unrelated context. This result suggests that discourse relations are representedindependently of the context in which they appear.