Supporting Materials for Guan & Arnold (2021)
The predictability of implicit causes: testing frequency and topicality explanations
Shuang Guan
Department of Linguistics, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore
and
Jennifer E. Arnold
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill
Guan, S. & Arnold, J. E. (in press). The predictability of implicit causes: testing frequency and topicality explanations. Discourse Processes.
ABSTRACT
In discourses involving implicit causality, the implicit cause of the event is referentially predictable; i.e. it is likely to be re-mentioned. But it is unclear how referential predictability is calculated. We test two possible explanations: 1) The frequency account suggests that people learn that implicit causes are predictable through experience with the most frequent patterns of reference in natural language; 2) The topicality account asks whether implicit causes tend to play topical roles in the discourse, which itself may lead to the perception of discourse accessibility. With two text analyses, we show that implicit causes are frequently re-mentioned, but only if we consider a narrow set of discourse circumstances, which would require comprehenders to track contingent frequencies. We found no evidence for the topicality account: implicit casuality affected predictability but not topicality, and in a corpus of natural speech, implicit causes tended to not occupy topical positions.