The comprehension of connectives is crucial for understanding the discourse relations that make up a text. We studied connective comprehension in English to investigate whether adult comprehenders acquire the meaning and intended use of connectives to a similar extent and how connective features and individual differences impact connective…

This study investigated how computer agents' language style affects summary writing in an Intelligent Tutoring System, called CSAL AutoTutor. Participants interacted with two computer agents in one of three language styles: (1) a "formal" language style, (2) an "informal" language style, and (3) a "mixed" language…

This study investigated how computer agents' language style affects summary writing in an Intelligent Tutoring System, called CSAL AutoTutor. Participants interacted with two computer agents in one of three language styles: (1) a "formal" language style; (2) an "informal" language style; and (3) a "mixed" language…

Efforts to understand changes in language development and variations in language production across lifespan have increased considerably in the past several decades (Sankoff, 2017). In narrative discourse production, although several studies have reported age-related differences, the findings are not consistent. Additionally, previous research has…

Grammatical and lexical cohesion are necessary conditions to guarantee a text's coherence (Halliday and Hasan 1976). Grammatical cohesion is classified into four types of relation: reference, conjunction, substitution, and ellipsis. This study aims to investigate the use of the cohesive device of reference in written discourse produced by…

Establishing local coherence relations is central to text comprehension. Positive-causal coherence relations link a cause and its consequence, whereas negative-causal coherence relations add a contrastive meaning (negation) to the causal link. According to the cumulative cognitive complexity approach, negative-causal coherence relations are…

Research has identified a number of linguistic features that influence the reading comprehension of young readers; yet, less is known about whether and how these findings extend to adult readers. This study examines text comprehension, processing, and familiarity judgment provided by adult readers using a number of different approaches (i.e.,…