Abstract
A misuse of connectives for Chinese speakers seems to imply their ignorance on connectives. To investigate the role of Chinese connectives on sentence comprehension, two self-paced reading experiments were conducted in the present study. Experiment 1 examined causations connected with causal connectives suoyi ‘so,’ yinci ‘so,’ erqie ‘and,’ and danshi ‘but.’ Experiment 2 contrasted connectives and adverbs and further inspected the interaction between danshi ‘but’ and adversative sentences. The effect of connectives was revealed with the causal connectives decreasing the RT of causations and the adversative connective lowering that of adversative sentences. Contrary to the explicit connectives, the coordinator and adverbs seem less powerful for the former is relatively neutral and vague and the latter fails to aid predictions. Therefore, this current study pinpoints the role of Chinese connectives which shouldn’t have been underestimated.