| Scope and method of study. This study investigated whether readers comprehend English single-sourced texts with cohesive devices differently from single-sourced texts without cohesive devices, and whether native and non-native English readers also comprehend the texts differently. Participants in the study were graduate students at Oklahoma State University and the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, including 40 native readers and 19 East Asian readers. Test instruments were two authentic single-sourced English texts, adjusted to emphasize or minimize between-paragraph cohesive ties. Each participant read a cohesive version of one text and a non-cohesive version of the other text. For each text, participants answered five global Likert-scale questions on the text's comprehensibility, used information from the text to complete five task items, and identified the cohesive devices they had used to connect pieces of information. Likert-scale ratings and task scores were analyzed with a series of Kruskal-Wallis tests, followed by Mann Whitney U tests on significant results, corrected with the Bonferroni method. Cohesive devices named by participants were tallied and categorized.; Findings and conclusions. On one Likert-scale item, non-native readers reported relationships among ideas in one of the cohesive texts to be significantly clearer than did native readers. On one task item, two groups of cohesive readers completed the task with significantly greater accuracy than did the corresponding two groups of non-cohesive readers. Of the semantic cohesive devices named, participants named more lexical cues than any other type; of the structural devices named, participants named bolded heading and subheadings most frequently. Within-paragraph lexical repetition may reinforce the effectiveness of between-paragraph cohesive devices. For readers of English single-sourced technical documents, textual cohesiveness may contribute more to reader comprehension than do adjustments for different linguistic backgrounds. |
