Premium
Plausibility and the comprehension of text
Author(s) -
Black Alison,
Freeman Paul,
JohnsonLaird P. N.
Publication year - 1986
Publication title -
british journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.536
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 2044-8295
pISSN - 0007-1269
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8295.1986.tb01980.x
Subject(s) - sentence , comprehension , psychology , frame (networking) , linguistics , cognitive psychology , computer science , philosophy , telecommunications
Implausible versions of stories were constructed by a panel of judges who filled in sentence frames from the originals from which all but the referring phrases had been deleted. In one condition each judge completed a sentence frame independently, resulting in a highly implausible story; in another condition each judge saw the two previous completed sentence frames before filling in a sentence frame, resulting in a mildly implausible story. Both versions had the same referential structure as the original. Two experiments showed that the more implausible a text, the harder it was to understand and remember. The results confirm the importance of plausibility in the construction of a mental model of a text.