Establishing coherence across sentence boundaries: an individual differences approach

The aim of this study was to investigate the cognitive abilities that underlie coherence building. A coherence judgement task was used for this purpose. The task was comprised of four conditions that resulted from crossing coherence and cohesion (the presence of a connective), a manipulation that elicited two-way interactions in both judgement accuracy and reading times. Hierarchical Linear Modelling was then used to assess the influence of individual difference variables (vocabulary, working memory, and decoding) on target sentence reading times across the four conditions. Two of these variables, working memory and vocabulary, shared cross-level interactions with the coherent-incohesive condition – the only condition in which coherence had to be established with an un-cued bridging inference. Vocabulary acted to decrease reading times associated with the condition whereas working memory acted to increase them. These effects are interpreted with reference to lexical quality and retrieval-based knowledge access.