Two experiments examine how men and women interpret pronouns in discourse. Adults are known to show a strong "first-mention bias": When two characters are mentioned ("Michael played with William…"), comprehenders tend to interpret subsequent pronouns as coreferential with the first of the two characters and to find pronouns…

This study examines preschoolers' acquisition of the maxims of the Cooperative Principle and the sociocognitive scaffolds that support this acquisition. In Study 1, 84 children between 3 and 5 years old were required to make passive judgments of violations of the Cooperative Principle. Results showed that children consistently identified…

During narrative comprehension, reading times increase for changes in time, space, characters, goals, and causation. This study examined the extent to which instructional manipulations modify dimension monitoring during reading and whether this affects comprehension. Sixty-seven participants read three narratives (pretest). Half of the…

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…

Gaps between what scientists and laypeople find plausible may act as a barrier to learning complex and/or controversial socioscientific concepts. For example, individuals may consider scientific explanations that human activities are causing current climate change as implausible. This plausibility judgment may be due-in part-to individuals'…

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…

Understanding conflicts between sources is an inherent part of science text comprehension. We examined whether readers' memories for conflicts and their situational interpretation of conflicts would be affected by reading goals and lexical cue phrases that signal rhetorical relationships. To this end, 198 undergraduates read multiple…

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…

We used ERP methodology to investigate how readers validate discourse concepts and update situation models when those concepts followed factive (e.g., knew) and nonfactive (e.g., "guessed") verbs, and also when they were true, false, or indeterminate with reference to previous discourse. Following factive verbs, early (P2) and later brain…

The study used Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count and Coh-Metrix software to examine linguistic differences with deception in an ultimatum game. In the game, the Allocator was given an amount of money to divide with the Receiver. The Receiver did not know the precise amount the Allocator had to divide, and the Allocator could use deception.…

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…

This article demonstrates the potential of sound iconicity for automatic text analysis. This study claims that--at least in poetic language--the ratio of plosive versus nasal sounds in a text predicts its emotional tone as it is perceived by readers; that is, poems that have a relatively high frequency of plosive sounds are more likely to express…

The research reported here addresses the status of the unselected meaning of a lexically ambiguous word in developing the larger meaning of the text by independently manipulating lexical and discourse-level variables in the text. In a series of 3 eye-movement experiments, participants read passages that contained 2 occurrences of an ambiguous…

Two experiments were conducted to assess the effects of various constraints on the processing of jokes. Participants read humorous jokes and nonhumorous alternatives of the jokes, which were presented in 3 conditions that manipulated discourse context (comedy, political, and control). In Experiment 1, participants rated the funniness of texts and…

Three experiments explored how pictures in award-winning children's storybooks contribute to their cohesion. In Experiment 1, one group of college students read storybooks with pictures, and another group read them with the pictures removed. Both groups answered questions inserted periodically. The source for about one half of the questions was…