That Noun Phrase May Be Beneficial and This May Not Be: Discourse Cohesion in Reading and Writing

Autor/inn/en	Crossley, Scott A.; Rose, Dani Francuz; Danekes, Cassondra; Rose, Charles Wesley; McNamara, Danielle S.
Titel	That Noun Phrase May Be Beneficial and This May Not Be: Discourse Cohesion in Reading and Writing
Quelle	In: Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 30 (2017) 3, S.569-589 (21 Seiten)Infoseite zur Zeitschrift PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Zusatzinformation	Weitere Informationen
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0922-4777
DOI	10.1007/s11145-016-9690-4
Schlagwörter	Nouns; Phrase Structure; Form Classes (Languages); Connected Discourse; Reading Comprehension; Sentences; Persuasive Discourse; Essays; High School Students; Writing Evaluation; Scores; Difficulty Level + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Phrasenstruktur; Analytischer Sprachbau; Leseverstehen; Sentence analysis; Satzanalyse; Persuasion; Persuasive Kommunikation; Essay; Aufsatzunterricht; High school; High schools; Student; Students; Oberschule; Schüler; Schülerin; Studentin; Schwierigkeitsgrad
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. (As Provided).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2022/4/11