Discourse Cues In Narrative Text: Using Production To Predict Comprehension
David W. Allbritton, Johanna D. Moore · 1999
Discourse cues (e.g., because, since, therefore, and so) express structural and semantic relationships between parts of an explanation, and are used ex-tensively by human tutors. Previous research by Moser and Moore (in preparation) revealed pat-terns of cue occurrence, placement, and selection in the speech of expert tutors during tutorial di-alogues. An experiment measuring both reading times and recognition memory for cued and un-cued sentences in a narrative text was conducted to test the hypothesis that patterns of cue usage observed in the speech of expert human tutors could predict comprehension. Small but reliable effects on comprehension were observed. The re-sults are discussed in relation to strategies for gen-erating comprehensible text in an Intelligent Tu-toring System, differences between narrative and expository texts, and the role of distributional analyses of naturally occurring dialogue in under-standing discourse comprehension.