Interpersonal Motives in Comprehension of Narratives

Abstract

We carried out 4 experiments to explore the influence of motivational knowledge in activating expectations about interpersonal actions in story comprehension. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants read episodes in which the characters' relationships could be close, distant, or superficial, and 1 character was involved in a situation that required giving help to another. We found that the reading times of the phrase that expressed the interpersonal action (i.e., "Rudolph defended Bertha against the jokes") were shorter when readers read this sentence after the helping situation and a close relationship. In Experiments 3 and 4, we measured the naming latency times of the goal linked to the helping situation (i.e., "defend") in different places within the text. The results showed that the characters' relationship directly did not influence the latencies of naming the goal. The results are explained with reference to the debate between the constructionist and memory-based text theories.

Noticing and Revising Discrepancies as Texts Unfold

“…Some researchers have contended that studies implementing experimenter-designed texts (so-called "textoids") might provide an incomplete Downloaded by [New York University] at 22:23 04 November 2014 picture of the processing activities readers routinely engage in during naturalistic reading (Graesser, Millis, & Zwaan, 1997). For example, readers might be differentially motivated to construct coherent representations depending on the quality of the content offered in experimental texts (e.g., Gámez & Marrero, 2001). The current set of materials included several instances of contradictions and inconsistencies, which may have encouraged careful processing of the texts or, in contrast, may even have led participants to discount the importance of revision based on repeated cases with contradictory descriptions.…”

Negation interacts with motivational direction in understanding action sentences

“…Stimuli. We selected a pool of approach and avoidance sentences from Marrero et al ( [18]; see also [32,31]); verbs were in past tense and third person singular. Approach and avoidance action verbs were varied, for example, reject, exclude, choose, accept, include, .…”

“…Here, we present a study aimed at examining the interaction between negation and motivational direction in sentence comprehension. For this purpose, we reused approach and avoidance sentences of a prior study ( [18], see also [31,32]), and introduced a manipulation of the polarity of the sentence. Firstly, we carried out a study where participants had to judge offline approach or avoidance meaning of sentences both in the affirmative and the negative version (see examples in Table 1).…”

Understanding approach and avoidance in verbal descriptions of everyday actions: An ERP study

“…Examples of sentence stimuli are shown in Table 1. We selected 160 experimental sentences (80 for approach and 80 for avoidance), from a pool of 220 sentences that we had elaborated from approach/avoidance sentences in Gámez and Marrero (2001), which presented person and thing names as predicates. There were things that referred to objects (bread, meat, receipt, picture, .…”