Facilitation of lexical form or discourse relation: Evidence from contrastive pairs of discourse markers

Abstract

Research has shown that people anticipate upcoming linguistic content, but evidence regarding expectations of specific lexical markers is mixed. We use the Dutch pair of discourse markers Aan de ene kant…Aan de andere kant (‘On the one hand…On the other hand’) and Enerzijds… Anderzijds (also equivalent to ‘On the one hand…On the other hand’) to test whether readers generate predictions of an upcoming contrast dependency based on the lexical marker for the first contrastive segment, and whether processing of the lexical marker for the second segment is facilitated (i) when the first segment contains a lexical marker to signal the upcoming contrast, and (ii) when that marker directly matches that of the second segment. In a self-paced reading study, we show that readers do generate expectations for upcoming discourse markers, in that the presence of a marker on the first segment facilitates processing of the marker on the second segment, but that a directly matching lexical form does not yield further facilitation. In an eyetracking study, we replicate the facilitative effect of the first marker of a lexical pair on the processing of the second marker, and show that this effect occurs in immediate processing. These results establish expectation-driven effects at the discourse level in early reading time measures, showing that comprehenders are aware of the discourse dependency established by a discourse marker and are flexible in identifying and integrating discourse relations with different markers.