PROCESSING CAUSAL AND DIAGNOSTIC STATEMENTS IN DISCOURSE

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.