Planning causes and consequences in discourse

We investigate the planning of cause and consequence in language production by examining participants' continuations to discourse fragments in four experiments. Our studies indicate how the content of the continuation, and the association between the continuation and prior text, are influenced by the nature of prior discourse. People tend to anchor upcoming utterances to information that is both temporally recent and textually recent (Experiment 1). Furthermore, when discourse fragments describe the cause of an event, continuations tend to describe its consequence, and vice versa (Experiments 2 and 3). Finally, people plan utterances based on prior causality information drawn from world knowledge about the typicality of events (Experiment 4). When this knowledge provides information about causes, people are more likely to plan an upcoming consequence. Hence, people seek to satisfy gaps in their discourse model of the unfolding narrative, and use features of textual and temporal recency to anchor their productions.