The psychologist said quickly, “Dialogue descriptions modulate reading speed!”

Abstract

The current study investigates whether the semantic content of a dialogue description can affect reading times on an embedded quote to determine if the speed at which a character is described as saying a quote influences how quickly it is read. Yao and Scheepers (2011) previously found that readers were faster to read direct quotes when the preceding context implied that the talker generally spoke quickly, an effect attributed to perceptual simulation of talker speed. The current study manipulated the speed of a physical action performed by the speaker independently from character talking rate to determine if these sources have separable effects on perceptual simulation of a direct quote. Results showed that readers spent less time reading direct quotes described as being said quickly compared to slowly (e.g., John walked/bolted into the room and said energetically/nonchalantly, “I finally found my car keys”), an effect that was not present when a nearly identical phrase was presented as an indirect quote (e.g., John…said energetically that he finally found his car keys). The speed of the character’s movement did not affect direct quote reading times. Furthermore, fast adverbs were themselves read significantly faster than slow adverbs, an effect we attribute to implicit effects on the eye movement program stemming from automatically activated semantic features of the adverbs. Our findings add to the literature on perceptual simulation by showing that these effects can be instantiated with only a single adverb, and are strong enough to override effects of global sentence speed.

The Influence of Direct and Indirect Speech on Source Memory

“…Despite that direct speech is perceived as more vivid (Stites et al, 2013;Yao et al, 2011Yao et al, , 2012Yao & Scheepers, 2011) and is used to make narratives more engaging (Labov, 1972;Li, 1986;Mayes, 1990;Wierzbicka, 1974), we found no clear evidence that people felt more transported when direct as compared to indirect speech was used. This could be due to the fact that the Narrative Transportation Scale (Green & Brock, 2000) not only taps into visual imagery but also includes items regarding cognitive and emotional-affective aspects.…”

“…For example, a context manipulation such that either a fast or a slow speaking protagonist was implied influenced reading times for direct but not indirect speech (Yao & Scheepers, 2011). Reading times for direct but not indirect speech were also affected by whether a certain utterance was produced quickly or slowly (Stites, Luke, & Christianson, 2013).…”

“…Participants read sentences, adopted from Stites et al (2013), in direct (e.g., John walked into the room and said energetically, "I finally found my car keys.") or indirect speech (e.g., John walked into the room and said energetically that he finally found his car keys.).…”

The Influence of Direct and Indirect Speech on Mental Representations

“…For instance, while the effect of implied talking speed on actual reading times may be a pervasive phenomenon, other aspects of the communicative situation [5], [6], such as a talker's voice or manner of speaking, may only be simulated under specific conditions. Together, our experiments paint a slightly complex, but coherent picture of the effect of direct and indirect speech quotations on comprehenders' mental representations.…”

“…Participants first performed a lexical decision task (see Experiment 1a). Next, they read 48 sentences online (24 experimental sentences that were adapted from [6]; 24 fillers that we created ourselves; see Appendix S3). Each sentence consisted of a direct or an indirect speech quotation.…”