Facilitation of lexical form or discourse relation: Evidence from contrastive pairs of discourse markers

Research has shown that people anticipate upcoming linguistic content, but evidence regarding expectations of specific lexical markers is mixed. We use the Dutch pair of discourse markers "Aan de ene kant...Aan de andere kant" (“On the one hand...On the other hand”) and "Enerzijds...Anderzijds" (also equivalent to “On the one hand...On the other hand”) to test whether readers generate predictions of an upcoming upcoming contrast dependency based on the lexical marker for the first contrastive perspective, and whether such predictions focus on a lexical form or rather on a discourse relation. In a self-paced reading, we show that readers do generate expectations for upcoming discourse markers, but that these expectations are not specific to a lexical form. In an eye-tracking study, we replicate the facilitative effect of the first marker of a lexical pair on the processing of the second marker, and show that this effect occurs in immediate processing. These results establish expectation-driven effects at the discourse level in the earliest possible reading time measures, showing comprehenders’ awareness of the discourse dependency established by a discourse marker along with their flexibility in identifying and integrating discourse relations with different markers.