Expect the Unexpected? The Processing of Possibility Hedges in Medical Diagnoses and Medical Advice

Expect the Unexpected? The Processing of Possibility Hedges in Medical Diagnoses and Medical Advice Abstract Expectation is known to have an impact on behavioral choices of human beings by intensifying the perception of something or distracting their attention away. However, little is known about how unexpected situations affect information processing. This study investigated the processing of possibility hedges. Specifically, it tested whether participants ignored possibility hedges when processing medical diagnoses and medical advice that contradicted their expectation. The results suggested that possibility hedges used in sentences did not affect the degree of participants’ surprise when reading unexpected text continuations. However, it was found that although participants paid attention to possibility hedges when asked to rate credibility of the texts, they paid attention to the hedges to a varying degree depending on whether situations mentioned in the text turned out to be better or worse than expected. The study added to the body of literature in information processing that unexpected text continuations can affect readers’ attention to language cues. Moreover, the study also shed some light on the doctor-patient communication topic. 1 Introduction Readers’ (or listeners’) expectation plays a key role in information processing. In real-time or online processing, it is known that readers do not wait until the next words appear but rather, predict the upcoming part of a text (Traxler, 2014) using any cues available to them (e.g., Desmet et al., 2006; Fine et al., 2013; Rohde et al., 2011). For example, when processing relative clauses which can modify either of the two noun phrases (e.g., the daughter of the policeman that…), up to the point of reading the relative clause marker that, readers have already made a prediction as to which nouns the upcoming relative clause modifies (Siriwittayakorn, 2015). Studies have confirmed that continuation of texts that is incompatible with readers’ expectation slows down the comprehension process comparing to the compatible one. Such effect of unexpected continuation is reflected in slower reading times (e.g., Fine et al., 2013; Rohde et al., 2011; Siriwittayakorn, 2015), or more eye fixations and regressions (e.g., Desmet et al., 2006). Readers’ expectation plays a crucial role not only in online reading but also in offline reading where readers can take their time re-reading sentences as many times as they want before coming to a conclusion how they understand the sentences. For example, Pozniak and colleagues (in press) found that unexpected continuation of a sentence leads to lower acceptability even though such continuation is perfectly grammatical. The examples both from online and offline reading experiments highlight the importance of expectation on text comprehension. As far as the issue is concerned, the effect of expectation on information processing has often been associated with processing difficulty measured in terms of reading times, eye fixations and regressions, and acceptability of sentences. Teeranoot Siriwittayakorn English Department, Faculty of Humanities, Chiang Mai University 239 Huay Kaew Road, Muang, Chiang Mai 50200 Thailand teeranoot.s@cmu.ac.th PACLIC 32 605 32nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation Hong Kong, 1-3 December …

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