THATS NEWS TO ME - READERS RESPONSES TO BRIEF NEWSPAPER ARTICLES

The present study extended the exploration of readers' imaginative pro cesses (i.e., spontaneous imagery and emotional response) to a new gen re of texts: newspaper articles. A corpus of 50 articles was collected from a well-defined population of naturally occurring texts (i.e., ar ticles with one or more subheadings and three to five paragraphs befor e the first subheading from the international section of the New York Times). The articles, reduced to titles and datelines and the text dow n to the first subheading (100-180 words), were randomly divided into sets of 25 which were used in two experiments. Undergraduates rated th eir response to the story (e.g., familiarity, interest, comprehension, imagery, emotional response) on 6-point Likert-type scales. In both e xperiments, ratings on all scales demonstrated high reliability and co nsiderable variability across stories. As in previous studies with lit erary texts and feature journalism articles, imagery and affective res ponses (i.e., emotional response, story interest) were moderately to s trongly related, and both were related to comprehension. Neither gener al topic nor story familiarity was related to comprehension.