Processing of positive-causal and negative-causal coherence relations in primary school children and adults: a test of the cumulative cognitive complexity approach in German.

Establishing local coherence relations is central to text comprehension. Positive-causal coherence relations link a cause and its consequence, whereas negative-causal coherence relations add a contrastive meaning (negation) to the causal link. According to the cumulative cognitive complexity approach, negative-causal coherence relations are cognitively more complex than positive-causal ones.