Text validation: Overlooking discrepancies in question constructions.

Abstract

There is converging evidence that readers monitor text coherence and consistency by immediate, nonstrategic processes of validation. The literature also offers numerous instances of deficient validation. A prominent example of the latter is that understanders tend to overlook discourse anomalies that are embedded in given (presupposed) sentence information. However, we previously documented reading time "consistency effects" (O'Brien & Albrecht, 1992) that exposed readers' sensitivity to both given and new text discrepancies in numerous declarative syntactic constructions (Singer et al., 2017; Singer & Spear, 2020). Five new experiments addressed these phenomena with reference to constructions regularly shown to mask discourse inconsistencies: namely, interrogatives. In striking contrast with declaratives, five interrogative conditions in four experiments yielded no significant consistency effect. Experiments 2-4 documented coincident consistency effects with declarative but not interrogative constructions. A fifth experiment denied that the interrogative-construction findings resulted from readers' lack of knowledge about critical concepts. The cognitive-scientific linguistic construct of verb resolutivity offers a possible basis for these outcomes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).