Mj. Traxler et al., PROCESSING CAUSAL AND DIAGNOSTIC STATEMENTS IN DISCOURSE, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition, 23(1), 1997, pp. 88-101
Diagnostic statements (e.g., It is raining because the streets are wet
) take longer to read than causal statements (e.g., The streets are we
t because it is raining). The authors present 4 experiments investigat
ing this phenomenon. In Experiment 1, a reading-time study, the author
s demonstrate that this difficulty is reversed when a more complex men
tal model is cued through the use of phrases like John thinks that and
John says that. Experiment 2 shows that the use of a modal constructi
on (e.g., Perhaps it is raining because the streets are wet) makes the
processing of diagnostics as easy as processing causals but does not
disadvantage causals. The authors explain the pattern of results by pr
oposing that readers build the simplest possible discourse representat
ion during interpretation and that readers adopt a specific pattern of
semantic interpretation. These proposals are tested and verified in E
xperiments 3 and 4.