Jazmín Cevasco (a) y Paul van den Broek (b)
(a) Universidad de Buenos Aires y Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, Argentina
(b) Dept. of Educational Studies, Leiden University, Holanda
(dp) Free Photos.
The comprehension of discourse involves the establishment of causal connections among statements. The Causal Network Theory (Trabasso & Sperry, 1985) allows us to examine the role of these connections in the construction of a coherent text representation. Cevasco and van den Broek (2008) applied its tools to explore the comprehension of spontaneous spoken discourse. Their results indicate that statements that have a large number of causal connections facilitate comprehension to a greater extent than those that have a low number of connections. These findings suggest that listeners rely on processing the causal interconnections between a speaker’s statements to derive a coherent representation of discourse in memory, and can provide useful insights for educators.
