ABSTRACT
The notion of discourse representation has a prominent place in current linguistic theories on discourse and discourse processing. From a processing point of view, the discourse representation is the cognitive representation of the information in the text that readers construct when they process the text. Concepts in the text activate world knowledge on the basis of which relations between sentences are computed and integrated into the discourse representation. Conjunctions play an important role in a discourse representation. Assuming that understanding a discourse is constructing a coherent representation, this function of the conjunction because should affect the reading process. In the psycholinguistic literature, there is evidence for the effects of segmentation, integration, and inference. These effects have been investigated as isolated effects independent of each other and related to different linguistic expressions. In that way, the different functions of the causal conjunction because are accounted for in the general framework of discourse understanding.
