Four experiments were designed to assess the presence and impact of stereotypical knowledge through an implicit measure of reading comprehension. In Experiments 1 and 3, participants read passages about protagonists in scenarios in which stereotypical knowledge was likely to become activated in memory. Following the descriptions, reading times for…

"Demonstrations" (e.g., direct quotations, conversational facial portrayals, conversational hand gestures, and figurative references) lack conventional meanings, relying instead on a resemblance to their referent. Two experiments tested our theory that demonstrations are a class of communicative acts that speakers are more likely to use…

Four experiments investigate the influence of topic status and givenness on how speakers and writers structure sentences. The results of these experiments show that when a referent is previously given, it is more likely to be produced early in both sentences and word lists, confirming prior work showing that givenness increases the accessibility…

Many communicative situations present interlocutors with the opportunity to use multiple modalities to establish shared perspectives on conversational referents, a process known as grounding. In the current study, we use a card-matching task to examine how conversational grounding in younger and older adults is influenced both by direct visual…

To successfully comprehend narrative text, readers often make inferences about different causes and effects that occur in a text. In this study, participants read texts in which events related to a cause were presented before an effect (i.e., the forward causal condition), texts in which an effect was presented before the events related to a cause…

The language of non-native speakers is less reliable than the language of native speakers in conveying the speaker's intentions. We propose that listeners expect such reduced reliability and that this leads them to adjust the manner in which they process and represent non-native language by representing non-native language in less detail.…

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…

Two word-by-word, self-paced reading experiments investigated the speed with which readers were sensitive to discourse-level anomalies. An account arguing for delayed sensitivity (Guzman & Klin, 2000) was contrasted with one allowing for rapid sensitivity (Myers & O'Brien, 1998). Anomalies related to spatial information (Experiment 1) and…

Overlaps with one's interlocutor in the choice of words are called lexical entrainment. This article looks at accounts for these overlaps in word use. The question addressed is the extent to which the word use of the addressee, as opposed to available words from other sources, has a special impact on experts' choice of words. A laboratory…

Several studies showed how coherence markers, like connectives and lexical cue phrases, influence the processing and representation of informative text. Although discourse analysts have repeatedly argued that coherence markers influence the processing of persuasive text as well, there is hardly any empirical evidence for this idea. This article…

Coherence plays a central role when readers construct meaning from a text. Previous research has shown how coherence marking affects text processing and representation. However, this effect seems to depend on reader's prior knowledge of the text content: Low knowledge readers benefit from coherence marking, whereas high knowledge readers benefit…

Three experiments show that, contrary to the current view, comprehenders do not unconditionally deactivate information marked by negation. Instead, they discard negated information when it is functionally motivated. In Experiment 1, comprehenders discarded negated concepts when cued by a topic shift to dampen recently processed information.…

This study investigates whether readers can generate predictive inferences that remain available to guide comprehension after a number of intervening sentences. The nature of the inference (detailed versus general) was also examined. In four experiments, participants read stories that suggested an inference. Reading time was measured to target…

According to current theories in discourse research, readers monitor a series of 5 situational dimensions during narrative comprehension (Zwaan, Langston, & Graesser, 1995; Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998). These dimensions are time (e.g., the order of events), space (e.g., locations), protagonist (e.g., main character actions), causality (e.g., how one…

In 3 experiments, we explored the accessibility of concepts of varying centrality as defined by the underlying events described in script-based passages. The accessibility of central concepts, as defined by event-relatedness, was compared to that of central concepts defined on the basis of the number of mentions in the text or based on their…