With the development of the Internet as a main source of information, teenagers are increasingly faced with multiple documents which may contain contradictory statements, and whose reliability must be assessed. One way to assess information reliability is to evaluate the source of the information (e.g., author expertise, intention). However,…

Text comprehension involves the ability to understand how texts relate to the situation they describe and to each other (i.e., a Document model). Research into Document models has emphasized the role of information sources in structuring readers' mental models of situations. The present article reviews research on source comprehension and examines…

In two experiments, undergraduate students read short texts containing two embedded sources that could either agree or disagree with each other. Participants' memory for the sources' identity (i.e., occupation) and features (i.e., the source's access to knowledge and the source's physical appearance) was examined as a function of the consistency…

Three experiments investigated the role of source information (i.e., who said what) in readers' comprehension of short informational texts. Based on the Discrepancy-Induced Source Comprehension assumption (Braasch, Rouet, Vibert, & Britt, 2012), we hypothesized that readers would be more likely to make use of source information when…