Processing causality and counter-causality: Interactions between syntactic structure and world knowledge during the comprehension of semantic relations

Abstract

This paper is part of a comprehensive study on the psycholinguistic processing of causality and counter-causality in discourse. The particular aim is to analyze the articulation between the semantic and syntactic information during this process. That is, how the syntactic complexity is related to the processing complexity when readers have to understand pieces of discourse that express particular semantic relationships: causal and counter-causal. One of the main objectives will be to study how the performance pattern changes when the possibility / impossibility to involve world knowledge conditions the process. We present a psycholinguistic experiment, which aims at analyzing the comprehension of causal and counter-causal relations, expressed by sentences with different syntactic structure –coordinates and subordinates– and in two conditions regarding the type of information: every-day items –the speaker may involve their world knowledge– and technical items –this intervention of previous world knowledge is not possible–. Results show that this factor determines the processing pattern and significantly modifies the articulation between syntactic complexity and processing complexity: only in the absence of prior knowledge, syntactic complexity is reflected directly in processing complexity.