Many psycholinguistic studies examine how people parse sentences in isolation; however, years of work in discourse processing have shown that sentence-level interpretations are influenced at some stage by discourse-level information. Evidence over the past 20 years remains mixed as to the temporal dynamics of such top-down interactions. In…

This conversation analytic study offers an empirical analysis of the Japanese turn-initial interjection "are." The interjectional "are" is said to be pragmatized from its use as a distal demonstrative and has been considered as an expression of a speaker's internal state of being surprised at something. In contrast, this study…

The study aimed to disentangle the influence of information status and referential form on the distribution of gestures in sustained discourse. Previous research shows that new and less accessible rather than old and more accessible information, expressed by rich rather than lean referential forms, is more likely to be accompanied by gestures.…

A considerable body of research has examined the age-old assertion that reading literature enhances empathy, however, mixed results have been found. The present study attempts to clarify such disparities, investigating the role of foregrounding in possible differences in readers' processing of literary texts and its connection with readers'…

This article investigates how members of an online community engaged in historical perspective taking in their discussions of the events and figures portrayed in a historical television show. As a means to justify their interpretations and situate themselves inside the possible mindsets of historical figures, members drew on three aspects of the…

Text social information includes the cognitive processes and social communication skills that support real or hypothetical human thought or interaction. The current measure of text social information is genre. However, genre is a limited measure because of poor operationalization, limited specificity, and overlap with structural and linguistic…

It is common for individuals to have misconceptions across a range of subject matters. Although interventions to correct misconceptions are largely successful, at times they may fail. The current study explores how corrections may be perceived to conflict with aspects of personal or social identity and engender experience of negative emotions and…

When telling a story, a speaker needs to refer to story characters using appropriate expressions, which requires a mental model of the discourse. We hypothesize that, compared to those of adults, children's discourse models are based more on factors that are less cognitively demanding, such as animacy, and as they grow older, discourse factors…