Verification of text ideas during reading

Abstract: This study inspected the processes of verifying the current discourse constituent against the referents that it passively cues during reading. It seemed plausible that, after understanding The customer ate pancakes, the processes of fully understanding The waiter implied that the customer ate eggs might resemble those of intentionally verifying The customer ate eggs (“false”). Therefore, one working hypothesis was that existing analyses of intentional sentence verification might bear on tacit verification during reading. Second, discourse pragmatics are likely to influence and regulate those verification processes. To explore this analysis, experiments implemented a reading time analogue of familiar sentence verification tasks. Story target sentences varied in their truth and use of negation with reference to antecedent text. Experiment 1 suggested that sentence reading time varies systematically with truth and negation, a result that was proposed to reflect the joint impact of discourse pragmatics and of verification operations akin to intentional ones. Experiment 2 denied that the latter results were appreciably affected by violations of the pragmatics of negation. Experiment 3 provided evidence that, when readers adopt an intentional verification strategy, reading times resemble those of intentional sentence verification. These results were interpreted to support the central assumptions of the study. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]