Effect of Genre Expectations on Text Comprehension

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TitelEffect of Genre Expectations on Text Comprehension
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication1994
ForfattereZwaan, Rolf A.
JournalJournal of Experimental Psychology
Mængde20
Udgave4
Pagination920-330
Resume

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.