TY  - JOUR
A1  - Knoepke, Julia
A1  - Richter, Tobias
A1  - Isberner, Maj-Britt
A1  - Naumann, Johannes
A1  - Neeb, Yvonne
A1  - Weinert, Sabine
T1  - Processing of positive-causal and negative-causal coherence relations in primary school children and adults : a test of the cumulative cognitive complexity approach in German
T2  - Journal of child language
N2  - Establishing local coherence relations is central to text comprehension. Positive-causal coherence relations link a cause and its consequence, whereas negative-causal coherence relations add a contrastive meaning (negation) to the causal link. According to the cumulative cognitive complexity approach, negative-causal coherence relations are cognitively more complex than positive-causal ones. Therefore, they require greater cognitive effort during text comprehension and are acquired later in language development. The present cross-sectional study tested these predictions for German primary school children from Grades 1 to 4 and adults in reading and listening comprehension. Accuracy data in a semantic verification task support the predictions of the cumulative cognitive complexity approach. Negative-causal coherence relations are cognitively more demanding than positive-causal ones. Moreover, our findings indicate that children's comprehension of negative-causal coherence relations continues to develop throughout the course of primary school. Findings are discussed with respect to the generalizability of the cumulative cognitive complexity approach to German.
Y1  - 2017
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/45053
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-450533
SN  - 1469-7602
SN  - 0305-0009
N1  - © Cambridge University Press 2016. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
VL  - 44
IS  - 2
SP  - 297
EP  - 328
PB  - Cambridge Univ. Press
CY  - London [u. a.]
ER  -