EFFECT OF GENRE EXPECTATIONS ON TEXT COMPREHENSION

This article investigates whether expectations about discourse genre i nfluence the process and products of text comprehension. Ss read texts either with a literary story or with a news story as the purported ge nre. Subsequently, they verified statements pertaining to the texts. T wo experiments demonstrated that Ss reading under a literary perspecti ve had longer reading times, better memory for surface information, an d a poorer memory for situational information than those reading under a news perspective. Regression analyses of reading times produced fin dings that were consistent with the memory data. The results support t he notion that readers differentially allocate their processing resour ces according to their expectations about the genre of a text.