Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We investigate how people understand English text that describes changes in a numeric quantity over time. We hypothesizethat people find it easier to comprehend text that specifies the starting quantity and ending quantity in chronological order,in contrast to how some news media tend to report this type of information, stating the ending quantity first, presumablybecause the ending quantity is the ”news”. Our hypothesis is that it is more difficult for readers to comprehend a sentencepresenting quantities in reverse chronological order, requiring more processing time by the reader and leading to reducedaccuracy in answering follow-up questions about the quantities. The results of an experiment supported the hypothesis.This finding has theoretical implications for models of text comprehension, and practical implications for how to commu-nicate technical material in newspapers, educational texts teaching or requiring the use of quantitative information, andtests and assessments based on reading passages.