What happened (and what didn't): Discourse constraints on encoding of plausible alternatives

Abstract

Three experiments investigated how font emphasis influences reading and remembering discourse. Although past work suggests that contrastive pitch contours benefit memory by promoting encoding of salient alternatives, it is unclear both whether this effect generalizes to other forms of linguistic prominence and how the set of alternatives is constrained. Participants read discourses in which some true propositions had salient alternatives (e.g., British scientists found the endangered monkey when the discourse also mentioned French scientists) and completed a recognition memory test. In Experiments 1 and 2, font emphasis in the initial presentation increased participants' ability to later reject false statements about salient alternatives but not about unmentioned items (e.g., Portuguese scientists). In Experiment 3, font emphasis helped reject false statements about plausible alternatives, but not about less plausible alternatives that were nevertheless established in the discourse. These results suggest readers encode a narrow set of only those alternatives plausible in the particular discourse. They also indicate that multiple manipulations of linguistic prominence, not just prosody, can lead to consideration of alternatives.

Keywords: alternative sets; discourse; fonts; reading; recognition memory.

Figure 1

Mean rate of true responses in Experiment 1 as a function of font emphasis and probe type, for participants who saw capitalization (top panel) and for participants who saw italicization (bottom panel). Responding true is a hit to a correct probe and a false alarm to an alternative or unmentioned probe.

Figure 2

Mean reading time in Experiment 2 on target words (left panel) and spillover words (right panel) as a function of font emphasis and emphasis type.

Figure 3

Mean rate of true responses in Experiment 2 as a function of font emphasis and probe type, for participants who saw capitalization (top panel) and for participants who saw italicization (bottom panel). Responding true is a hit to a correct probe and a false alarm to an alternative or unmentioned probe.

Figure 4

Mean reading time in Experiment 3 on target words and spillover words as a function of font emphasis.

Figure 5

Mean rate of true responses in Experiment 3 as a function of font emphasis and probe type. Responding true is a hit to a correct probe and a false alarm to an alternative or merely mentioned probe.