TY - JOUR T1 - Effect of Genre Expectations on Text Comprehension JF - Journal of Experimental Psychology Y1 - 1994 A1 - Zwaan, Rolf A. AB -

This article investigates whether expectations about discourse genre influence the process and products of text comprehension. Ss read texts either with a literary story or with a news story as the purported genre. Subsequently, they verified statements pertaining to the texts. Two experiments demonstrated that Ss reading under a literary perspective had longer reading times, better memory for surface information, and a poorer memory for situational information than those reading under a news perspective. Regression analyses of reading times produced findings that were consistent with the memory data. The results support the notion that readers differentially allocate their processing resources according to their expectations about the genre of a text.

VL - 20 SP - 920-330 CP - 4 ER -