Given evidence of anticipation within sentences (for upcoming sounds, words, and syntacti

Cummins, Christopher

Demberg, Vera

Nicolet, Emily

Rohde, Hannah

Scholman, Merel

V. Demberg

H. Rohde

M. Scholman

C. Cummins

E. Nicolet

CiteSeerX

“On the one hand ” as a Cue in the Comprehension of Discourse Structure

Edinburgh Research Explorer

     Edinburgh Research Explorer                                      "On the one hand" as a cue in the comprehension of discoursestructureCitation for published version:Demberg, V, Rohde, H, Scholman, M, Cummins, C & Nicolet, E 2015, '"On the one hand" as a cue in thecomprehension of discourse structure' First Conference of the TextLink COST Action Network on"Structuring Discourse in Multilingual Europe". Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, Belgium, 1/01/15, .Link:Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research ExplorerDocument Version:Other versionGeneral rightsCopyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s)and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise andabide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.Take down policyThe University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorercontent complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright pleasecontact openaccess@ed.ac.uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately andinvestigate your claim.Download date: 05. Apr. 2019“On the one hand” as a Cue in the Comprehension of Discourse Structure V. Demberg, H. Rohde, M. Scholman, C. Cummins, E. Nicolet Given evidence of anticipation within sentences (for upcoming sounds, words, and syntactic structures; Delong, et al. 2005; Kamide, et al., 2003; Levy, 2008), an open question is how comprehenders use cross-sentence cues to anticipate upcoming relationships between sentences.  Within sentences, words combine via syntactic rules to determine what structures are possible. Between sentences, however, the resulting discourse structure is less constrained.  Models of discourse coherence typically target relations that can be inferred to hold between pairs of propositions (Asher & Lascarides, 2003; Hobbs, 1979; Kehler 2002; Mann & Thompson, 1988; Prasad et al. 2008), with few hard constraints regarding the eventual structure of the discourse (cf. Roberts, 1996). Nevertheless there are cases in which the possible relations that could hold between a current sentence and a subsequent sentence are restricted. Existing work primarily targets local effects (e.g., verb-driven biases for the immediately upcoming sentence; Kehler et al., 2008; Staub & Clifton, 2006).  Here we consider the contrast relation between sentences marked with On the one hand and On the other hand.  Based on evidence of syntactic prediction (e.g., dependencies like either…or, Staub, 2006), our goal is to test whether comprehenders use On the one hand as a cue to anticipate upcoming discourse structure and furthermore how their processing of On the other hand is influenced by intervening material.  The expression On the one hand signals that a subsequent proposition will provide a contrast and will likely be marked with the expression On the other hand.  The anticipation of a subsequent contrast can be satisfied immediately (e.g., Joe was interested in a car.  On the one hand, it looks flashy.  On the other hand, it doesn’t get very good mileage.). If the expected contrast is delayed, comprehenders are predicted to process On the other hand differently depending on the type of intervening material.   Self-paced reading study:   Participants (n=60, recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk) read sentences phrase-by-phrase via a web-based interface (IbexFarm). The intervening material varied—either leaving the expectation for contrast unfulfilled by mentioning causal information (1a,1b) or providing a contrast that could plausibly resolve the expectation for contrast (1c).  Reading times were measured at On the other hand. (1)  SentenceA: Joe was interested in a car.    SentenceB:     (a) On the one hand, he would like to buy it, because it looks flashy.   (b) On the one hand, it looks flashy, so he would like to buy it.   (c) On the one hand, he would like to buy it, but he might try leasing it first.   SentenceC:  On the other hand, it doesn’t get very good mileage. As predicted, On the other hand in SentenceC was read faster following conditions with causal information (1a,1b) than contrastive information (1c), suggesting that participants used On the one hand as a cue to an upcoming contrast and were surprised (as evidenced by their reading-time slowdown) by On the other hand when they had already encountered a plausible contrast. Comprehenders thus use discourse connectors to predict discourse relations and can maintain such predictions across clauses.    References Asher, N., & Lascarides, A. (2003). Logics of Conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DeLong, K. A., Urbach, T. A., & Kutas, M. (2005). Probabilistic word pre-activation during language comprehension inferred from electrical brain activity. Nature Neuroscience, 8, 1117-1121. Hobbs, J. R. (1990). Literature and cognition. Stanford, CA: CSLI. Lecture Notes 21. Kamide, Y., Altmann, G. T. M., & Haywood, S. L. (2003). The time-course of prediction in incremental sentence processing: Evidence from anticipatory eye movements. Journal of Memory and Language, 49, 33-156. Kehler, A. (2002). Coherence, reference, and the theory of grammar. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. Kehler, A., Kertz, L., Rohde, H., & Elman, J. L. (2008). Coherence and coreference revisited. Journal of Semantics, 25, 1–44. Levy, R. (2008). Expectation-based syntactic comprehension. Cognition, 106, 1126-1177.  Mann, W. C., & Thompson, S. A. (1988). Rhetorical structure theory: Toward a functional theory of text organization. Text, 8, 243-281. Prasad, R., Dinesh, N., Lee, A., Miltsakaki, E., Robaldo, L., Joshi, A. & Webber, B. (2008) The Penn Discourse Treebank 2.0.  In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC). Marrakech, Morocco. Roberts, C. (1996). Information structure in discourse: Towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics. OSU Working Papers in Linguistics, 49: Papers in Semantics. Rohde, H. & Horton, W. (2014). Anticipatory looks reveal expectations about discourse relations. Cognition, 133(3), 667-691.  Staub, A., & Clifton Jr, C. (2006). Syntactic prediction in language comprehension: Evidence from either... or. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 32(2), 425.  

"On the one hand" as a cue in the comprehension of discourse structure

https://www.pure.ed.ac.uk/ws/files/27599683/DembergRohdeScholmanCumminsNicolet.2015.abstract.pdf

"On the one hand" as a cue in the comprehension of discourse structure

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

CiteSeerX

Edinburgh Research Explorer