Local News Media Cultivation of Host Receptivity in Plainstown

This message‐system and cultivation analysis investigated the influence of local news on the host receptivity of native‐born “Plainstown” residents toward immigrants. The message‐system analysis revealed that regional television and newspaper immigration coverage was more pessimistic, while local newspaper immigration coverage was more optimistic. A cultivation analysis confirmed that attention to pessimistic coverage interacted with conversations about immigration to reduce host receptivity. This research contributes to the study of cross‐cultural adaptation by constructing and validating a measure of Y. Y. Kim's (2001) concept of host receptivity. By demonstrating that second‐order cultivation is the product of on‐line cognitive processes, this research provided additional validation of Shrum's (2004) online model of second‐order cultivation. Findings suggest that optimistic immigration news frames may facilitate host receptivity.     

The Wind Chilled the Spectators, but the Wine Just Chilled: Sense, Structure, and Sentence Comprehension

Anticipation plays a role in language comprehension. In this article, we explore the extent to which verb sense influences expectations about upcoming structure. We focus on change of state verbs like shatter , which have different senses that are expressed in either transitive or intransitive structures, depending on the sense that is used. In two experiments we influence the interpretation of verb sense by manipulating the thematic fit of the grammatical subject as cause or affected entity for the verb, and test whether readers' expectations for a transitive or intransitive structure change as a result. This sense-biasing context influenced reading times in the postverbal regions. Reading times for transitive sentences were faster following good-cause than good-theme subjects, but the opposite pattern was found for intransitive sentences. We conclude that readers use sense-contingent subcategorization preferences during on-line comprehension.