Are Three Words All We Need? Recognizing Genre at the Sub-Sentential Level

Genre identification is a critical facet of text comprehension, but very little is known about the process and information constraints of classifying texts by genres. In this study, higherskill and lower-skill participants read 210 sentences from three genres. The words in the sentences were presented sequentially, one at a time. With each new word, participants decided whether the sentences came from a narrative, science, or history text. Both groups were able to correctly identify the genre by the third word of the sentence. Higher-skilled readers made their genre decisions more quickly and more accurately, and were also more precise in their selection of narrative texts. The study includes a computational model that uses text features from only the first three words of the sentences. The model reflects key features of the participants’ genre classifications.