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That noun phrase may be beneficial and this may not be: discourse cohesion in reading and writing

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Abstract

This paper examines the effects of attended and unattended demonstratives on text processing, comprehension, and writing quality in two studies. In the first study, participants (n = 45) read 64 mini-stories in a self-paced reading task and identified the main referent in the clauses. The sentences varied in the type of demonstratives (i.e., this, that, these, and those) contained in the sentences and whether the referent was followed by a demonstrative determiner and noun (i.e., an attended demonstrative) or a demonstrative pronoun (i.e., an unattended demonstrative). In the second study, 173 persuasive essays written by high school students were rated by expert judges on overall writing quality using a standardized rubric. Expert coders manually counted the number and types of demonstratives (attended and unattended demonstratives) in each essay. These counts were used to predict the human scores of essay quality. The findings demonstrate that the use of unattended demonstratives as anaphoric references is disadvantageous to both reading time and referent identification. However, these disadvantages become advantages in terms of essay quality likely because linguistic complexity is a strong indicator of high proficiency writing. From a text processing and comprehension viewpoint, the findings indicate, then, that anaphoric reference is not always beneficial and does not always create a more cohesive text. In contrast, from a writing context, the use of unattended demonstratives leads to a more linguistically complex text, which generally equates to a higher quality text.

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Notes

  1. The SAT is a college entrance exam commonly administered in the United States. An important component of the exam is a writing section in which test-takers are required to produce an essay based on general knowledge within a 25-min time frame.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported in part by the Institute for Education Sciences (IES R305A080589 and IES R305G20018-02). Ideas expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IES. We thank our expert raters for their assistance in scoring the essays used in this study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Applied Linguistics/ESL, Georgia State University, 25 Park Place Suite 1500, Atlanta, GA, 30303, USA

    Scott A. Crossley, Dani Francuz Rose, Cassondra Danekes & Charles Wesley Rose

  2. Department of Psychology, Learning Sciences Institute, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Danielle S. McNamara

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  1. Scott A. Crossley
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  2. Dani Francuz Rose
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  3. Cassondra Danekes
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Correspondence to Scott A. Crossley.

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Crossley, S.A., Rose, D.F., Danekes, C. et al. That noun phrase may be beneficial and this may not be: discourse cohesion in reading and writing. Read Writ 30, 569–589 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-016-9690-4

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