While there is a substantial amount of evidence for language processing being a highly incremental and predictive process, we still know relatively little about how top-down discourse based expectations are combined with bottom-up information such as discourse connectives. The present article reports on three experiments investigating this question using different methodologies (visual world paradigm and ERPs) in two languages (German and English). We find support for highly incremental processing of causal and concessive discourse connectives, causing anticipation of upcoming material. Our visual world study shows that anticipatory looks depend on the discourse connective; furthermore, the German ERP study revealed an N400 effect on a gender-marked adjective preceding the target noun, when the target noun was inconsistent with the expectations elicited by the combination of context and discourse connective. Moreover, our experiments reveal that the facilitation of downstream material based on earlier connectives comes at the cost of reversing original expectations, as evidenced by a P600 effect on the concessive relative to the causal connective.

中文翻译：

---

因果语篇和让步话语连接词的在线处理

尽管有大量证据表明语言处理是一个高度增量和预测性的过程，但对于基于自上而下的话语的期望与自下而上的信息（如话语连接词）如何结合，我们仍然知之甚少。本文报道了使用两种语言（德语和英语）使用不同方法（视觉世界范例和ERP）调查此问题的三个实验。我们发现支持因果关系和让步话语连接词的高度增量处理，从而导致预期即将出现的材料。我们的视觉世界研究表明，预期的外观取决于语篇的连接词；此外，德国ERP研究还发现，N400对目标名词前面的带有性别标记的形容词有N400效应，当目标名词与上下文和话语连接词的组合所引起的期望不一致时。而且，我们的实验表明，基于早期连接词促进下游材料是以逆转最初期望为代价的，这是由P600对因果关系相对于因果连接词的影响所证明的。