Processing Discourse: Evidence from a Semantics-Informed Psycholinguistic Study

This work consists of a psycholinguistic study on discourse relations (DRs) in European Portuguese (EP), framed by a semantic basis. The aim of the article is to provide an updated theoretical framework on the main key aspects related to the study of the psycholinguistic processing of DRs, as well as to share some recent data on an online processing task of DRs in EP. In the first part of the article, we report the main themes related to processing of DRs, addressing aspects related to the processing of lexical connectives, issues related to causality and continuity, as well as aspects related to linear sentence order. In the second part of the article, recent data on the study of processing of DRs in EP are presented and discussed.