Accessibility of information following a topic shift in expository texts

Topic shifts have been shown to decrease accessibility of prior information in narrative texts. Two experiments examined whether readers encounter difficulty accessing specific topic information following topic shifts in expository texts. Experiment 1 demonstrates that if readers are not forced to make contact with specific information in order to maintain coherence of the text, they do not show increases in processing for sentences that connect to information that was provided prior to a topic shift. In Experiment 2, readers were required to connect back to topic information that occurred prior to a topic shift in order to resolve an inconsistency in the texts. It was found that even when readers were required to access information from an earlier topic, no indication of changes in accessibility following a topic shift were observed.