Cirilo, R. K., & Foss, D. J. (1980). Text structure and reading time for sentences. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 19(1), 96-109.

Cirilo, R.; Foss, D.

1980

Cirilo, R. K., & Foss, D. J. (1980). Text structure and reading time for sentences. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 19(1), 96-109.

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Two experiments examining the influence of a story's structure on the comprehension of its sentences are presented. It was expected that sentences at high levels in a story would take longer to encode than those at low levels, either because cues to the sentences' roles exist within the story or because of differential difficulty of integrating the sentences into the prior context. Moreover, the greater density of new information early in stories might result in comprehension being affected by the serial position of a sentence within a story. The reading times for the individual sentences (or clauses) of stories were measured where a particular sentence appeared at one hierarchical (and/or serial) position in one story and at a different hierarchical (and/or serial) position in another story. In both experiments high-level sentences took longer to read than low-level ones and early-occurring sentences longer than late-occurring ones. Recall data supported the structural assignment of the critical sentences. These results were discussed both in terms of the initial hypotheses and in terms of W. Kintsch and T. A. van Dijk's

The results from the two experiments support the hypothesis that readers are sensitive to the structure of a story as they read it. Subjects took longer to read a sentence when it played a high-level role in a text than when the same sentence played a low-level role, and they took longer to read a sentence when it occurred early in a text as compared to when it occurred late.

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