For years, researchers have examined financial data in corporate earnings announcements and their influence on market participants. More recently, a body of research has been developing recognizing the impact of narrative disclosures and managers' deliberate language choices. However, no prior studies have investigated those language choices of managers which are likely unintentional in composing such narratives; language choices which, as previous research has revealed, escape conscious access. Using an empirically-grounded model which systematically classifies different predicates, I examined whether managers use systematic patterns of language when construing the earnings press release in a likely unintentional effort to channel or direct readers' attention. I found that managers write positive information using a more concrete construal than negative information. Additionally, I used experimental data to examine whether these systematic differences lead to different perceptions of the company and its value as an investment alternative. Nonprofessional investors performed an analysis of an earnings press release where I manipulated the valence of the narrative as positive or negative and the construal of the narrative as abstract or concrete. I found that these manipulations had an interactive influence on investment decisions. Specifically, investors were least likely to invest when a negatively valenced narrative was written concretely. I also found that the influence of the narrative on the investment decision was direct and not the result of the narrative influencing the investors' focus of attention on the accompanying financial statements. Additionally, I tested whether the investor judgments were due to intentional cognitive effects and found that the influence of the narrative on the investment decision was not conscious on the part of the investor. Lastly, I conducted an analysis of archival data to examine the relationship between managers' language use in forward-looking statements of the earnings press release and future firm performance and the extent to which the market responds to these linguistic clues. Results from the analysis suggest that construal is predictive of future firm performance and the market is incorporating this into pricing for firms that meet or beat earnings expectations.

本研究使用TFIDF文字探勘技術分析樣本公司年度財務報告裡面的重要非量化資訊，與三項量化財務比率比較，欲探討公司年報在不同市場裡文字敘述與財務表現之一致性。研究結果顯示，根據從2003年至2010年上市半導體公司之年度報告，美國公司的年報較會對財務表現做出誇大的文字敘述，本研究亦發現在文字敘述上，市場較不成熟的中國公司所發布之年報較偏向低估他們的財務表現。 / This study presented a way to extract useful information out of unstructured qualitative textual data with the use of the TFIDF text mining technique, which was used to help us explore for consistencies between financial performance in the form of quantitative financial ratios and qualitative narrative disclosures in the annual report between countries with different levels of market development. The results show that, based on listed semiconductor companies' annual reports between 2003 to 2010, companies in the United States have a high tendency to exaggerate and overstate about their performance in the MD&A, while less developed markets such as China turned out to have the lowest tendency to exaggerate and was more likely to understate about its performance in their Director's Report.