Context Strengthens Initial Misinterpretations of Text

Abstract

Three self-paced reading experiments examined the effect of context on interpreting subsequent sentences and in the difficulty of revising initial misinterpretations of subsequent temporarily ambiguous sentences. Target sentences containing noun phrase/sentence (NP/S) coordination ambiguities were preceded by contexts that either did or did not support the preferred, incorrect “NP and NP” interpretation. Online reading times and offline comprehension question responses were the dependent variables. Results suggest that when propositional content of incoming text is consistent with propositional content of the context, readers often hang on to the resulting coherent interpretation even when subsequent input contradicts it. Results also suggest that (a) context affects reading times and final interpretation; (b) when context and comprehension questions bias readers toward the incorrect interpretation, even unambiguous sentences are regularly misinterpreted; and (c) both semantic content and syntactic form of context influence how the context and subsequent text are integrated in memory.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank the members of the Educational Psychology Psycholinguistics Lab at the Beckmann Institute for assistance in data collection. This research was funding in part by an NSF CAREER Award (BCS-0847533), a UIUC Campus Research Board Award, and a College of Education Bureau of Educational Research Summer Research Support Award to the first author. A portion of these data were presented at the Festschrift for Charles E. Clifton, Jr., Royal Society of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland. We thank the audience of that presentation for their valuable comments.