Repeating phrases across unrelated narratives: evidence of text repetition effects

Research has shown that text repetition effects are limited to conditions in which the context remains consistent across the two processing episodes, particularly when readers are focused on comprehension. Despite this, we found evidence of transfer effects across unrelated narratives. In a repeated condition, an ambiguous phrase appeared in two consecutive stories. In Story A, the phrase was presented in a sarcasm-biasing context, and in Story B, the phrase was presented in a neutral context. The pattern of findings from an offline measure (Experiment 1) and a reading time measure (Experiments 2, 3, and 4) indicated that participants were more likely to interpret the phrase in Story B as sarcastic in the repeated version than in a nonrepeated version, in which the phrase was absent from Story A. We conclude that during the reading of Story B, the phrase was reactivated from memory, even though the two stories were unrelated.