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Coherence comprehension in different populations
Poster Session F, Friday, October 2, 2:45 - 4:45 pm, Wangari Maathai
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Katharina Spalek1, Stefan Heim2,3; 1Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, 2Universitätsklinikum Aachen, 3RWTH Aachen
Background: Coherence refers to the logical connections within a text. Problems in processing linguistic coherence are symptomatic for cognitive communication disorders [1]. These are mostly observed in patients’ narrative productions. Less is known about coherence comprehension. Ultimately, we want to investigate coherence comprehension in two clinical populations who have known difficulties with coherence: schizophrenia patients and elderly patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Here we present the data of young, healthy controls. By the time of the conference, the data from elderly, healthy controls will be available, too, allowing for a comparison of two different age groups. In the course of the project, the young controls will be compared to schizophrenia patients and the elderly controls to patients with MCI. Methods: Twenty-eight German university students (17 women, 11 men) with a mean age of 26 took part in the study. Eighty German sentence pairs were used inspired by [2]. Half of the sentence pairs had an underlying causal relationship, the other half had an underlying temporal relationship. Incoherent sentence pairs were created by changing the pairings of first and second sentence. Half of the sentence pairs were presented with a connector (deshalb ‘therefore’, dann ‘then’). Different experimental lists were created to ensure full counterbalancing. Participants read a given sentence pair one sentence after the other. After the presentation of the second sentence, participants judged the coherence of the sentence pair by moving a slider between the two endpoints “coherent” and “not coherent”. An invisible scale from 0 – 100 underlying the slider bar provided us with coherence ratings. We also collected reading times for the second sentence. Results and discussion: There is a clear coherence effect in the ratings – coherent pairs received a mean rating of 91.7, and incoherent pairs of 14.3 (β = -38.7, t = -48.8, p < .001). The presence of a connector increased coherence ratings slightly, but significantly (51.6 vs 54.9, β = -1.6, t = -4.3, p < .001). Both coherence (β = -1.5, t = -4.3, p < .001) and connector presence (β = 1.2, t = 3.3, p < .001) significantly interact with the type of relation: While causal relations are hardly affected by the presence or absence of a connector (fitting well with the ‘causality-by-default’-hypothesis by [3]), temporal relationships are perceived more clearly when they are made explicit by a connector – to the extent that participants start seeing temporal successions where none were intended originally. Second sentences were read faster in coherent than incoherent cases (1839 ms vs. 2340 ms, β = 266, t = 5.6, p < .001), showing that coherent continuations were easier to integrate with the preceding context. Second sentences in causal relations were processed faster (2009 ms) than those in temporal relations (2166 ms, β = -115, t = -5.5, p < .001)), again supporting causality as default. [1] Peach & Coelho. Neuropsychologia, 80:157–164, 2016. [2] Ferstl & Von Cramon. Cognitive Brain Research, 11(3):325–340, 2001. [3] Sanders. Proceedings SEM-05, 105–114, 2005.
Topic Areas: Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics, Disorders: Acquired