Whose story is this? Discrepancy triggers readers’ attention to source information in short narratives

Abstract

Three experiments investigated the role of source information (i.e., who said what) in readers’ comprehension of short informational texts. Based on the Discrepancy-Induced Source Comprehension assumption (Braasch, Rouet, Vibert, & Britt, 2012), we hypothesized that readers would be more likely to make use of source information when summarizing stories that included discrepant statements. Readers would also memorize source information more accurately. Experiments 1 and 2 found that American and French college students were more likely to refer to source information when they summarized news reports containing discrepant assertions. A detailed content analysis of the summaries also indicated that students use hedging and several other tactics to resolve contradictions. Experiment 3 replicated Braasch et al.’s finding that sources of discrepant stories were more likely to be recalled than sources of consistent stories. Experiment 3 also extended these findings using longer texts and a different reading task. Altogether the data support the Documents Model framework of multiple source comprehension.