English
 
Help Privacy Policy Disclaimer
  Advanced SearchBrowse

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Released

Journal Article

Expectations on hierarchical scales of discourse: Multifractality predicts both short- and long-range effects of violating gender expectations in text reading

MPS-Authors
/persons/resource/persons187755

Wallot,  Sebastian       
Department of Language and Literature, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Max Planck Society;
University Aarhus;

External Resource
No external resources are shared
Fulltext (restricted access)
There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.
Fulltext (public)
There are no public fulltexts stored in PuRe
Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
Citation

Booth, C. R., Brown, H. L., Eason, E. G., Wallot, S., & Kelty-Stephen, D. G. (2018). Expectations on hierarchical scales of discourse: Multifractality predicts both short- and long-range effects of violating gender expectations in text reading. Discourse Processes, 55(1), 12-30. doi:10.1080/0163853X.2016.1197811.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-002B-4498-0
Abstract
Reader expectations form across hierarchical scales of discourse (e.g., from coarse to fine: genre, narrative, syntax). Cross-scale interactivity produces word reading times (RTs) with multifractal structure. After introducing multifractals, we test two hypotheses regarding their relevance to reader expectations: (1) multifractal evidence of cross-scale interactions from RTs preceding violation of expectations would interact with mean reading speed to predict RTs immediately after the expectation violation and (2) postsurprise RTs would exhibit stronger cross-scale interactions. Thirty-four adult participants read one of two 2,000-word stories that used gender stereotypes to suggest that an ambiguously named protagonist was male. However, the stories postponed gender information until word 1,000: male in one story and female in the other. For slower readers, cross-scale interactions accentuated postreveal slowing but also minimized subsequent pausing over 15 postreveal RTs. Surprise strengthened cross-scale interactions over all postsurprise RTs. These results suggest that multifractality may index anticipation across multiple scales of discourse.