ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Lang. Sci.
Sec. Psycholinguistics
This article is part of the Research TopicInsights in Psycholinguistics: 2025View all 5 articles
The Facilitating Effect of Connectives across Relations and Languages
Provisionally accepted
- 1Universitat des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken, Germany
- 2Alexander von Humboldt Institut fur Internet und Gesellschaft GmbH, Berlin, Germany
- 3Universitat Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany
- 4Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands
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The facilitating effect of connectives on discourse processing has been found to be smaller in result relations, compared to other relations (e.g. concession). In addition, connectives are hypothesized to facilitate more in some languages than in others due to typological differences between languages. Speakers of analytic languages (such as English) are assumed to rely more on contextual cues and therefore be less affected by the presence of a connective than speakers of synthetic languages (such as German), who are presumed to rely more on lexical information. We present two self-paced reading studies examining how the effect of a connective depends on the relation type and the language. We find that the presence of a connective facilitates reading more in concession relations than in result relations. This interaction between relation type and relation marking was only found in German.
Keywords: Cross-linguistic, Connectives, causality, self-paced reading, Replication
Received: 09 Oct 2025; Accepted: 21 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Marchal, Hewett, Scholman, Shahmohammadi, Stede and Demberg. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Merel C.J. Scholman
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