Two experiments explored the hypothesis that anaphors and demonstratives signal different procedural instructions: Whereas the anaphor "it" brings a concrete entity into a reader's focus, the demonstrative "this" directs the focus to a predicate proposition in a discourse representation. The findings from an online eye-tracking…

Constraints on linguistic variation are consistent across adult speakers, yielding probabilistic and systematic patterns. Yet, little is known about the development of such patterns during childhood. This study investigates Spanish subject pronoun expression in naturalistic data from 154 monolingual children in Mexico, divided into four age…

According to Question-Under-Discussion (QUD) models of discourse interpretation, clauses cohere with the preceding context by virtue of providing answers to (usually implicit) questions that are situated within a speaker's goal-driven strategy of inquiry. In this article we present four experiments that examine the predictions of a QUD model of…

This study aims to establish whether connectives can create referential expectations in discourse, and, if so, what these expectations are based on: connective semantics or frequency distributions in language use. This was tested by comparing the processing of the connectives "and" and "but" in Dutch and Russian by means of an…

Introduction: Little is known about how group cohesion develops in online support group communities. Previous research suggests that message content, self-disclosure, and emotional expression may be central to this process. The purpose of this study was to identify linguistic and qualitative characteristics of participants' messages that…