TY - JOUR
T1 - That noun phrase may be beneficial and this may not be
T2 - discourse cohesion in reading and writing
AU - Crossley, Scott A.
AU - Rose, Dani Francuz
AU - Danekes, Cassondra
AU - Rose, Charles Wesley
AU - McNamara, Danielle
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported in part by the Institute for Education Sciences (IES R305A080589 and IES R305G20018-02). Ideas expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IES. We thank our expert raters for their assistance in scoring the essays used in this study.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.
PY - 2017/3/1
Y1 - 2017/3/1
N2 - This paper examines the effects of attended and unattended demonstratives on text processing, comprehension, and writing quality in two studies. In the first study, participants (n = 45) read 64 mini-stories in a self-paced reading task and identified the main referent in the clauses. The sentences varied in the type of demonstratives (i.e., this, that, these, and those) contained in the sentences and whether the referent was followed by a demonstrative determiner and noun (i.e., an attended demonstrative) or a demonstrative pronoun (i.e., an unattended demonstrative). In the second study, 173 persuasive essays written by high school students were rated by expert judges on overall writing quality using a standardized rubric. Expert coders manually counted the number and types of demonstratives (attended and unattended demonstratives) in each essay. These counts were used to predict the human scores of essay quality. The findings demonstrate that the use of unattended demonstratives as anaphoric references is disadvantageous to both reading time and referent identification. However, these disadvantages become advantages in terms of essay quality likely because linguistic complexity is a strong indicator of high proficiency writing. From a text processing and comprehension viewpoint, the findings indicate, then, that anaphoric reference is not always beneficial and does not always create a more cohesive text. In contrast, from a writing context, the use of unattended demonstratives leads to a more linguistically complex text, which generally equates to a higher quality text.
AB - This paper examines the effects of attended and unattended demonstratives on text processing, comprehension, and writing quality in two studies. In the first study, participants (n = 45) read 64 mini-stories in a self-paced reading task and identified the main referent in the clauses. The sentences varied in the type of demonstratives (i.e., this, that, these, and those) contained in the sentences and whether the referent was followed by a demonstrative determiner and noun (i.e., an attended demonstrative) or a demonstrative pronoun (i.e., an unattended demonstrative). In the second study, 173 persuasive essays written by high school students were rated by expert judges on overall writing quality using a standardized rubric. Expert coders manually counted the number and types of demonstratives (attended and unattended demonstratives) in each essay. These counts were used to predict the human scores of essay quality. The findings demonstrate that the use of unattended demonstratives as anaphoric references is disadvantageous to both reading time and referent identification. However, these disadvantages become advantages in terms of essay quality likely because linguistic complexity is a strong indicator of high proficiency writing. From a text processing and comprehension viewpoint, the findings indicate, then, that anaphoric reference is not always beneficial and does not always create a more cohesive text. In contrast, from a writing context, the use of unattended demonstratives leads to a more linguistically complex text, which generally equates to a higher quality text.
KW - Attended demonstratives
KW - Discourse cohesion
KW - Essay quality
KW - Text comprehension
KW - Text processing
KW - Unattended demonstratives
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U2 - 10.1007/s11145-016-9690-4
DO - 10.1007/s11145-016-9690-4
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84988345917
SN - 0922-4777
VL - 30
SP - 569
EP - 589
JO - Reading and Writing
JF - Reading and Writing
IS - 3
ER -