Effect of Genre Expectations on Text Comprehension

• Published in: Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition Vol. 20; no. 4; pp. 920 - 933
• Main Author: Zwaan, Rolf A
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Washington, DC American Psychological Association 01-07-1994
• Subjects: Biological and medical sciences; Cognition & reasoning; Expectations; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Human; Language; Literature; Production and perception of written language; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Reading; Reading Comprehension; Social research; Human; Verbal memory; Verbal comprehension; Reading; Language; Cognition; Experimental study; Expectation
• ISSN: 0278-7393; 1939-1285
• DOI: 10.1037/0278-7393.20.4.920

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.