We examined processing of written irony by recording readers' eye movements while they read target phrases embedded either in ironic or non-ironic story context. After reading each story, participants responded to a text memory question and an inference question tapping into the understanding of the meaning of the target phrase. The results…

We explore how people express and interpret lexical cues of interaction involvement in dyadic conversations via instant messaging (IM) in two studies. In Study 1, an experiment with 60 participants, we manipulated level of involvement in a conversation with a distraction task. We examined how participants' uses of verbal cues such as pronouns…

Negated words take longer to recognize than non-negated words following sentences with negation, suggesting that negated concepts are less active. The present experiments tested the possibility that this reduced activation would not persist beyond immediate testing. Experiment 1 used a probe task and materials similar to those used in previous…

Whether information is routinely and nonstrategically evaluated for truth during comprehension is still a point of contention. Previous studies supporting the assumption of nonstrategic validation have used a Stroop-like paradigm in which participants provided yes/no judgments in tasks unrelated to the truth or plausibility of the experimental…

Prior research has shown that readers are sensitive to causal relations between sentences. In addition, the extent to which readers put weight on causal relations seems to depend on their reading skill. Very little attention, however, has been given to the perception of causal relations linguistically expressed by different types of causal verbs…

The present study examined the influence of a human or computer "partner" on the production of fillers ("um" and "uh") during a question and answer task. Experiment 1 investigated whether or not responding to a human partner as opposed to a computer partner results in a higher rate of filler production. Participants…

Although significant attention has been devoted to prosody in discourse production, relatively little is known about prosody's effect on discourse interpretation. This article explores the ability of synthetic manipulations of prosody to bias interpretation of discourse ambiguities where a first sentence is linked to two following sentences…

One pronoun production experiment and one pronoun comprehension experiment were performed to investigate the role of grammatical number information in long-distance anaphora, with referent and pronoun either in adjacent sentences or separated by an intervening sentence. The experiments tested the assumption that the influence of grammatical number…

Gygax, Gabriel, Sarrasin, Oakhill, and Garnham (2008) showed that readers form a mental representation of gender that is based on grammatical gender in French and German (i.e., masculine supposedly interpretable as a generic form) but is based on stereotypical information in English. In this study, a modification of their stimulus material was…

Frames are cognitive structures of knowledge grounded in people's social interaction in recurrent sociocultural activities or individual incidences. Discussion concerning the knowledge in frames largely focuses on its linguistic manifestation with regard to roles and role relations in scenes. Little attention has been paid to the scriptal…

How people describe complex arrangements of objects in a small-scale setting has not been sufficiently investigated to predict when discourse strategies shift versus remain stable. In a study involving 100 native German participants, we investigated speakers' choices of perspective, as well as location and orientation information, when describing…

Recognition judgments to the non-antecedents of a repeated-noun anaphor are slower and less accurate after than before the processing of the anaphor. Disagreement exists as to whether this pattern of performance reflects a bias shift carried out by a memory process associated with the recognition of a word that has previously occurred in the…

In a pedagogical method increasing in popularity, students of all levels--from elementary to post graduate--are likely to be asked to engage in debate with peers. How they understand the purposes and values of argumentive discourse is likely to affect its effectiveness. The 3 studies presented here involve junior high school, senior high school,…

This work examined how adjunct displays influence college readers' moment-by-moment processing of text and the products of reading, using reading time (Experiments 1 & 2), and think-aloud methodologies (Experiment 3). Participants did or did not study a diagram before reading a text. Overall, the reading time data, think-aloud data, and recall…

Two experiments examined whether inconsistent effects of analogies in promoting new content learning from text are related to prior knowledge of the analogy "per se." In Experiment 1, college students who demonstrated little understanding of weather systems and different levels of prior knowledge (more vs. less) of an analogous everyday situation…