The presence of an event in the narrated situation affects its availability to the comprehender

Abstract

Narrative descriptions of events often depart from how these events would have occurred in "real time." For example, narratives often contain time shifts in which events that are irrelevant to the plot are omitted. Zwaan (1996) has shown that these time shifts may affect on-line comprehension. Specifically, they are associated with increases in processing load and a deactivation of previous information. The experiments in the present article show that the situation is more complex. Specifically, there is only a deactivation of previous events if they are not assumed to be ongoing after a time shift. Furthermore, explicit discontinuations of events, as in he stopped walking also lead to deactivations when compared with explicit continuations and resumptions.The general assumption in research on narrative comprehension is that comprehenders are influenced by the nature of the situation that is being described. The idea is that comprehenders place themselves, to some extent, "in" the narrated situation. Such a shift from an actual situation to a described situation has been termed a deictic shift (Duchan, Bruder, & Hewitt, 1995; see also MacWhinney, 1999). As a consequence of this deictic shift, people, objects, and events that are in the narrated situation should be more accessible to comprehenders than people, objects, and events that are not. That is, nodes that code for these situational entities should be more activated when the entities are present in the situation than when they are not.Zwaan (1999b) has reviewed various findings in the literature that are consistent with this idea. Objects that are in the situation yield shorter recognition latencies to their associated words than do objects that are not in the situation. For instance, response latencies to the word cake are faster when the text states that Mary baked cookies and cake than when the text states that Mary baked cookies but no cake, despite the fact that the word occurs in both sentences (Macdonald & Just, 1989). This is not due simply to the presence of the word not. Kaup (1999) obtained similar effects for He destroyed the desk, but not the table. In this case, the object qualified by not was in the situation and its associated word yielded faster recognition responses. Similarly, a memory node that codes forWe thank Eileen Goodwin, Loretta Handegard, LaRicka Wingate, and Daisy Winkler for their assistance with data collection and Mike Rinck and Tom Trabasso for their helpful comments on a previous version. Address all correspondence to R. A. Zwaan,

Tracking of spatial information in narratives

“…In contrast, in the present experiments, when location information was relevant to the characters' goals and actions, readers immediately updated their situation model. In a similar manner, it has been found that after a time shift, information that is no longer relevant to a narrative is suppressed (Anderson et al, 1983;Carreiras et al, 1997;Magliano & Schleich, 2000;Zwaan, 1996), whereas information that continues to be relevant remains active (Experiment 1; Anderson et al, 1983;Magliano & Schleich, 2000;Zwaan et al, 2000).…”

“…This suggests that time shifts only lead to the reduction in accessibility of temporally bound information, such as scenario-dependent characters or brief actions (cf. Anderson, Garrod, & Sanford, 1983;Zwaan, Madden, & Whitten, 2000), rather than to all concepts prior to them. More critically, we can conclude that the reduction in accessibility of characters' former locations in the time and location shift condition resulted from the change in location rather than the change in time.…”

Readers’ sensitivity to linguistic cues in narratives: How salience influences anaphor resolution

“…In addition to the finding that readers make use of syntactic focus as a salience cue (e.g., Birch & Rayner, 1997;McKoon et al, 1993), a great deal of evidence has been accumulated that suggests that readers make use of other linguistic markers to structure their mental representation of texts. For example, morphosyntactic cues such as verb tense and aspect have been shown to foreground concepts in readers' representation of text (Carreiras, Carriedo, Alonso, & Fernández, 1997;Magliano & Schleich, 2000;Morrow, 1985;Zwaan, Madden, & Whitten, 2000). Thus, in agreement with Kintsch's (1992) argument, it appears that comprehension is influenced by a host of linguistic cues and that theories of discourse comprehension have not fully accounted for the linguistic richness of texts.…”

Représentation de l’espace et du temps dans le modèle situationnel construit par un lecteur

“…28 La majorité des autres recherches à propos de la dimension temporelle se sont intéressées à l'impact d'une rupture de la continuité temporelle sur la compréhension (Bestgen, Vonk, 1995Speer, Zacks, 2005 ;Zwaan, 1996 ;Zwaan, Madden, Whitten, 2000). Tout particulièrement, Zwaan (1996) a fait lire de brèves narrations dans lesquelles une phrase cible était introduite par un adverbial temporel comme « Un instant plus tard », « Une heure plus tard » ou « Un jour plus tard ».…”

“…Toutefois, comme pour la dimension spatiale, quelques études remettent en cause cette thèse. Zwaan, Madden et Whitten (2000) ont nuancé les conclusions de Zwaan (1996) en montrant que l'effet d'un adverbial temporel comme « Une heure plus tard » n'est pas lié à la rupture temporelle qu'il induit, mais au fait que sa longueur est suffisante pour indiquer que la situation (événement ou activité) préalablement en cours est terminée ou non. En d'autres mots, la simple présence d'un adverbial signalant une rupture temporelle importante est insuffisante pour produire une mise à jour du modèle situationnel et le ralentissement de la lecture que cette mise à jour induit.…”