La dirección y la distancia en el establecimiento de la coherencia referencial durante el procesamiento de textos académicos escritos en Español

For the last forty years, a great number of studies regarding referential coherence and its processing has been carried out. In most of them, pronoun disambiguation is understood as an invariable phenomenon. From our perspective, due to the type and amount of knowledge involved, during academic reading, the way certain factors affect this type of processing is different from the way they do during non-specialized texts reading. In this work, we study the effect of referential distance and referential direction on referential coherence processing when reading academic texts written in Spanish. To do so, we carried out two experiments in which we assessed time and accuracy of answers in the processing of discourse segments corresponding to texts from Psychology and Construction Engineering. Equal to the case of studies on general discourse processing, results show that when reading academic texts written in Spanish, referential direction and referential distance have a significant effect in the establishment of referential coherence. But, in the case of academic discourse processing, processing is more efficient in cataphoric condition.