On the Persistence of Discourse Predictions: The Facilitative Effect of Discourse Markers Diminishes in the Presence of Intervening Material

The current study investigates for how long readers maintain expectations about an upcoming discourse relation. We use the pair of discourse markers On the one hand (OT1H) and On the other hand (OTOH) to test the facilitative effect of OT1H on the processing of OTOH and the sensitivity of this effect to the presence of intervening material. Results from a story continuation study indicate that intervening material slightly weakens the effect of OT1H on offline representations of the discourse. Results from a self-paced reading and two eye-tracking studies suggest that the presence of intervening material diminishes the facilitative effect of OT1H in online processing. These results support memory-based models of processing by showing that discourse dependencies, while they are built as fine-grained representations, are not unbounded in real-time processing.