Effort enhances understanding, while appreciation drives engagement in Cross-sentence semantic processing

Comprehensive reading requires active semantic processing, going beyond explicitly stated information to construct connections and meaning. Building on discourse coherence theory, Reader-Response Theory and insights from Language Poetry, the present research investigates how active engagement and cognitive effort shape semantic processing. We propose that evaluative dimensions central to aesthetic appreciation, namely understanding, interest, and liking, also play important roles in semantic processing. To examine these processes, we developed a novel cross-sentence elaboration paradigm using unconnected, randomly paired sentences that create semantic gaps and encourage reader-driven meaning construction. In Experiment 1, participants could voluntarily invest effort by thinking aloud during elaboration. Results showed greater volitional engagement was associated with higher levels of understanding, interest, and appreciation. Experiment 2 dissociated willingness to engage from actual effort, revealing that appreciation predicted participants' willingness to invest further effort, whereas additional completed effort did not consistently increase appreciation. Experiment 3 examined forced effort, showing that externally imposed effort enhanced semantic understanding but did not consistently increase appreciation, highlighting the distinct roles of volitional and imposed effort. An integrated 2 × 2 analysis of Experiments 2 and 3 showed that active engagement and cognitive effort made distinct, interactive contributions to evaluation and processing time, with completed cognitive effort more reliably predicting accurate recognition memory and active engagement more closely tied to memory for the processing context. Together, these findings clarify the interplay between engagement, effort, understanding, and appreciation, offering new insights into the cognitive dynamics of active meaning construction in semantic processing.