This article investigates whether expectations about discourse genre influence the process and products of text comprehension.
Subjects read texts with either a literary story or with a news story as the purported genre.
Subsequently, they verified statements pertaining to the texts. Two experiments demonstrated that subjects reading under a literary perspective has longer reading times, better memory for surface information, and a poorer memory for situational information than those reading under a news perspective. Regression analyses of reading times produced findings that were consistent with the memory data. The results support the notion that readers differentially allocate their processing resources according to their expectations about the genre of the text.