Lecture
The Online Processing of Causal and Concessive Relations: Comparing Native Speakers of German and Chinese
The paper aims to test the causality-by-default hypothesis, which suggests that causality is constructed by default during text comprehension, making it easier and faster to process than other coherence relations. Concession, on the other hand, often considered as negative causality, is expected to be less inferable and cognitively more demanding. To test this hypothesis across different languages, an eye-tracking reading experiment was conducted in which native speakers of German and Chinese read sentences online (causal vs. concessive, explicit vs. implicit), with their reading processes recorded and compared.