Most existing discourse annotation guidelines have focused on the English language. As a result, there is a significant lack of research and resources concerning computational discourse-level language understanding and generation for other languages. To fill this relevant gap, we introduce the first discourse annotation guideline using the rhetorical structure theory (RST) for low-resource languages. Specifically, this guideline provides accurate examples of discourse coherence relations in three romance languages: Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. We further discuss theoretical definitions of RST and compare different artificial intelligence discourse frameworks, hence offering a reliable and accessible survey to new researchers and annotators.

The present study aimed to investigate whether contextual factors influence how a reference is processed in discourse. We used intact and violated presuppositions (PSP), triggered by a definite or indefinite noun phrase, to monitor the reference process. In one sentence set, a contextual referent was explicitly mentioned close or far from the PSP-triggering noun phrase (memory context). In another sentence set, a referent was not explicitly mentioned in the context, but an inference to a referent was either plausible or implausible due to contextual semantic relations (inference context). Participants were asked to rate the coherence of the discourse after listening to it. Our results revealed a strong influence of the temporal distance of the contextual presentation of a referent. When the referent was far in the context (memory context), PSP violations were judged to be less severe than for close referents, suggesting that they are less clearly represented in memory. Furthermore, PSP violations seemed to play a subordinate role when the semantic context provided a basis for the plausible presence of a referent (inference context). Our results suggest that discourse comprehension involves referential processes whose importance may fade with distance in memory or may be obscured by semantic contextual content.

Social factors impact sentence comprehension in a first language (L1), suggesting that semantic processing cannot be dissociated from social and moral emotions in relation to pro/antisocial individuals. Given that integrating multiple types of information and processing emotion-laden pragmatic information is costlier in a second language (L2), we investigated whether social factors would affect discourse comprehension similarly in L2. Processing the outcomes of scenarios involving pro/antisocial protagonists provoked similar neural patterns in L2 as in L1 (Rodríguez-Gómez, Martín-Loeches, Colmenares, Romero Ferreiro & Moreno, 2020), suggesting that L2 users simultaneously integrate semantic and discourse-pragmatic information during sentence comprehension.

During the comprehension of narrative texts, readers keep a mental representation of the location of protagonists and objects; a breach in spatial coherence is detected by longer online reading times (consistency effect). We addressed whether these spatial inferences involve verbal or spatial working memory in two experiments, combining the consistency paradigm with selective verbal and spatial working memory concurrent tasks. The first experiment found longer reading times with a concurrent spatial task under imagery instructions (t33 = 2.87, p = .021). The second experiment, under comprehension reading instructions, found effects of verbal interference on reading times and accuracy. With a verbal secondary task, reading times for the target sentence were shorter (t45 = 3.60, p = .004) and the error rate was significantly higher (t47 = 2.95, p = .005) than without interference. This pattern of results suggests that spatial inferences in narrative comprehension rely mainly on verbal resources, and spatial working memory resources are recruited when imagery is required.