Author:

Keywords:

Social Sciences, Psychology, Multidisciplinary, Psychology, COHERENCE RELATIONS, INFERENTIAL CONDITIONALS, COMPREHENSION, CONNECTIVES, DISCOURSE, MEMORY, TEXTS, ACQUISITION, CAUSAL, 1701 Psychology, 1702 Cognitive Sciences, Experimental Psychology, 5201 Applied and developmental psychology, 5204 Cognitive and computational psychology, 5205 Social and personality psychology

Abstract:

The study investigates the types of coherence relations adults and children can recall after having read a text. We discerned content and epistemic relations (Dancygier, 1998; Sweetser, 1990). Content relations express relations between events in reality. Epistemic relations typically express relations between states of thinking (premise-conclusion relations). The relations between the two parts of a content or epistemic relation is often made explicit by means of connectives. The differences between these types of sentences have been shown in different areas (e.g., reasoning, clause integration, acquisition). However, no clear results could be reached as for recall of these relations and the interaction with connectives. We aim to clarify this debate by means of an experiment involving 539 participants. The experiment revealed that the difficulty associated with epistemic relations decreases as participants get older. Interestingly, connectives play a larger role in participants' ability to recall epistemic compared to content relations.