ABSTRACT
This study employs reading time and eye-movement paradigms to test a model of how readers understand connected discourse by using signals to textual cohesion. The model (Singer, Revlin & Halldorson, 1990) views the computation of cohesion as a form of enthymemic reasoning in which the reader establishes Goais and Subgoals consistent with a syllogistic structure. In the present study, university students were timed as they read a pair of sentences, half of which were related by a signal to cohesion (e.g., too, as in Juan is a shortstop. Maria is athletic too). The model claims that in comprehending such sentence pairs, it is necessary for readers to compute bridging inferences (e.g., Singer, Halldorson, Lear, & Andrusiak, 1992) to provide missing information (e.g., "shortstops are athletic" and "Juan is athletic"). To generate such inferences, the sentence relations are represented in an enthymemic format as:
