Abstract

ZUNINO, Gabriela M.  and  RAITER, Alejandro. Discourse Coherence construction: A preliminary study about causality and its neuropsycholinguistic implications. Neuropsicologia Latinoamericana [online]. 2012, vol.4, n.2, pp. 1-15. ISSN 2075-9479.  http://dx.doi.org/10.5579/rnl.2012.0082.

The purposes of this article are: a) To study the differences in the linguistic processing between brief texts (two sentences) with causal relation between the sentences and texts without causal relation between them (Experiment 1); b) To study the construction of semantic relations on the ground of a continuation paradigm of multiple choice responses with and without connective (Experiment 2), reflecting about the neuropsicolinguistic implications of the results obtained in both of this experiments. In order to achieve this purposes, we first designed specific psycholinguistic tests and then, we evaluated 40 native Spanish speakers subjects. We registered and analized the responses and times (TRs) required to solve the task in order to infer some of the cognitive underlying processes appearing during the production and comprehension of texts. The results of both experiments showed that: a) causality is processed more easily (less errors and smaller times) than other semantic/conceptual relations, b) there is a clear tendency to construct causal relations to achieve global textual coherence, c) the absence of causal relation is perceived as a semantic incongruence and therefore, it represents an obstacle when constructing a coherent mental representation that allows the comprehension of the complete text. The Tasks and the data obtained in this work can be useful to assess linguistic components in neurological populations, as well as to develop neuroimaging studies.

Keywords : Psycholinguistics; Causality; Discourse processing; Textual coherence; Semantic.

        · abstract in Spanish | French | Portuguese     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )