![]() ![]() While behavioral studies have clearly established that the build up of causal coherence across clauses is a prerequisite for successful comprehension, they are limited in how much information they can yield about the nature and time-course of causal inferencing. For example, to connect the sentence, “The next day his body was covered in bruises” to a preceding statement such as “Joey’s brother became furiously angry with him”, one must infer that Joey’s brother must have been so angry that he hit Joey. However, when statements are less causally related, more complex inferences are necessary to establish necessary and sufficient causal connections between them ( Bloom et al., 1990 Fletcher, Hummel, & Marsolek, 1990 Graesser & Clark, 1985 Keenan et al., 1984 Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978 Long, Golding, Graesser, & Clark, 1990 Myers & Duffy, 1990 Myers et al., 1987 Van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983). ![]() The fire went out”, readers activate their real-world knowledge that water extinguishes fire ( Singer, 1993 Singer, Andrusiak, Reisdorf, & Black, 1992 Singer & Halldorson, 1996). For example, in comprehending highly causally related sentence pairs such as, “Dorothy poured the bucket of water on the bonfire. These inferences vary in complexity: when two statements are highly causally related, they simply entail the activation and integration of relevant real-world knowledge. They are also faster to recognize ( McKoon & Ratcliff, 1989), name (e.g., Klin, 1995 Potts, Keenan, & Golding, 1988) and make lexical decisions (e.g., Potts et al., 1988 but see McKoon, Ratliff, & Ward, 1994) on probe words that are introduced following causally related (versus causally unrelated) sentences.Ĭausal coherence is often established through causal inferences – information that is not explicitly stated in the text but which is required to establish causal relationships across clauses. There is consistent behavioral evidence that, during reading, comprehenders make use of such causal relationships to establish coherence during comprehension: people are faster to read sentences that are causally related (versus causally unrelated) to their preceding sentence (e.g., Haviland & Clark, 1974 Keenan, Baillet, & Brown, 1984 see also Bloom, Fletcher, van den Broek, Reitz, & Shapiro, 1990 Myer, Shinjo, & Duffy, 1987). Further, they suggest that causal coherence, at the situation level, can influence incremental word-by-word discourse comprehension, even when semantic relationships between individual words are matched.Ĭausal relationships play a vital role in structuring the meaning of text and discourse by establishing physical, motivational, and psychological links between expressed events, actions, and states ( Fletcher & Bloom, 1988 Schank & Abelson, 1977 Trabasso, van den Broek, & Suh, 1989 Trabasso & Van den Broek, 1985 van den Broek, 1990). These results indicate that both simple and complex causal inferences can influence the earliest stages of semantically processing an incoming word. No modulation of the Late Positivity/P600 component was observed across conditions. ![]() At midline sites, the N400 to intermediately related sentence-final words was attenuated to the same degree as to highly causally related words, but otherwise the N400 to intermediately related words fell in between that evoked by highly causally related and intermediately related words. Critical words in causally unrelated scenarios evoked a larger N400 than words in both highly causally related and intermediately related scenarios, regardless of whether they appeared before or at the sentence-final position. Lexico-semantic co-occurrence was matched across the three conditions using a Latent Semantic Analysis. ERPs were measured while participants read and judged the relatedness of three-sentence scenarios in which the final sentence was highly causally related, intermediately related and causally unrelated to its context. This study examined neural activity associated with establishing causal relationships across sentences during online comprehension.
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