The influence of genre on the processing of objective and subjective causal relations: Evidence from eye-tracking

When people process an utterance, they need not only understand
what it literally means, they also have to interpret the text in terms of speaker
involvement: does an utterance convey a subjective opinion rather than a fact?
Earlier research has shown that people take more time to process subjective
causal relations, showing an opinion, than when this information is part of an
objective relation: Representing subjectivity requires an extra cognitive operation.
In this chapter we investigate whether the text genre (informative newspaper
texts versus argumentative letters to the editor) influences the processing
of subjective relations; they might be easier in argumentative genres, because
the text as a whole conveys an opinion. Indeed, longer reading times were
found for the letters to the editor, but overall, subjective relations still took
more time than objectives. We discuss the implications of this result for theories
of discourse processing.