句對閱讀中的連貫作用

During the reading process, the successful understanding of the text comes from a consistent mental representation (Kintsch, 1988), and mental representation is inseparable from coherence relation (Hobbs, 1979). Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of coherence on the sentence pairs reflected in the reading time, coherence judgment, and recall performance whennative Chinese speakers read the four types of coherent sentence pairs. The sentence pairs are composed of high/low causal relatedness and high/low semantic relatedness. The entire research was conducted through E-Prime Professional 2.0. The research findings are as follows: (1) The main effect of both causal relatedness and semantic relatedness on reading time is significant: causal relatedness, F₁(1, 62) = 94.56, p = 0.000; F₂(1, 62) = 67.95, p = 0.000 (high causal, M = 2,192.62 vs. low causal, M = 3,057.71); semantic relatedness, F₁(1, 62) = 5.31, p= 0.02 (high semantic, M = 2,717.57 vs. low semantic, M = 2,532.77). When sentences have high causal relatedness, high semantic sentence pair is faster than low semantic of the simple main effect (high semantic, M = 2,039.27 vs. low semantic, M = 2,345.98). When sentences have low causal relatedness, high semantic sentence pair is slower than low semantic (high semantic, M = 3,395.87 vs. lowsemantic, M = 2,719.56). (2) The main effect of both causal relatedness and semantic relatedness oncoherence judgment is significant: causal relatedness, F₁(1, 62) = 1,212.66, p = 0.000;F₂(1, 62) = 2,670.82, p = 0.000 (high causal, M = 1.96 vs. low causal, M = 1.17); semantic relatedness, F₁(1, 62) = 58.08, p = 0.000; F₂(1, 62) = 55.684, p = 0.000 (high semantic, M = 1.63 vs. low semantic, M = 1.50). (3) The main effect of both causal relatedness and semantic relatedness on recall performance is significant: causal relatedness, F₁(1, 62) = 70.57, p = 0.000; F₂(1, 62) = 80.363, p = 0.000 (high causal, M = 0.67 vs. low causal, M = 0.52); semantic relatedness, F₁(1, 62) = 93.94, p = 0.000; F₂(1, 62) = 59.460, p = 0.000 (high semantic, M = 0.67 vs. low semantic, M = 0.17). In general, this study shows that semantic relatedness plays an important role just as causal relatedness to judgewhether a sentence pair is coherent or not. Also, causal relatedness effectively promotes the processing speed of sentence pairs, while the effect of semantic relatedness is not as strong as causal relatedness. Lastly, both of these coherence relations are beneficial to the quality of the recall performance in terms of short-term memory.