Who said what? Source memory for narrator and character agents in literary short stories.

Abstract

One dimension of reading literacy involves the tracking of agents associated with the text. In a literary short story, there is a society of character agents and pragmatic agents. This study investigated the relative salience of different classes of agents in memory. Two experiments measured source memory as an index of agent salience in long-term memory. Patterns of source memory scores supported an invisible third-person narrator hypothesis and an agent amalgamation hypothesis, but not a structural prominence hypothesis: First-person narrator > nonnarrator character > third-person narrator > 0. Statement detection parameters did not significantly differ among the 3 classes of agents, so differences in source memory could not be explained by differences in the content of the speech acts. Source memory scores also could not be explained by surface features of the text, differences among readers, and sophisticated guessing on the basis of a story abstract.Comprehenders potentially construct multiple agents in their cognitive representations when they read a story. Each agent has human qualities, such as speaking, perceiving, believing, knowing, wanting, liking, acting, and experiencing emotions. For example, the characters in a story constitute one ensemble of agents. The protagonists and antagonists are presumably more salient than the minor characters and those agents who are functionally props. Another ensemble of agents, called the pragmatic agents, participate in a one-sided communication from the narrator to the narratee, or from the author to the reader. The narrator is the agent who presents the story to an imaginary addressee or recipient, called the narratee. The author is the actual person who writes the story, whereas the reader is either an actual or virtual reader of the story. Some of these pragmatic agents are presumably low in salience (if not invisible) to the reader, although the relative salience of these agents has never been tested empirically. The present study was designed to test some hypotheses about the relative salience of different classes of agents in long-term memory.The pragmatic agents have a functional role in all text genre, not just stories. In fact, one of the important dimensions of reading literacy addresses the status of these

The Influence of Direct and Indirect Speech on Source Memory

“…We are interested in the identity rather than the credibility of the source. Previous research on source identity found better source memory for stories with a first person narrator (e.g., "I came home and poured myself a Scotch") than a third person narrator (e.g., "He came home and poured himself a Scotch"; Graesser, Bowers, Olde, & Pomeroy, 1999;Graesser, Millis, & Zwaan, 1997). This finding is neutral with regard to the question whether speech type affects source memory as the use of direct and indirect speech does not depend on a specific narrator perspective.…”

Conflicting but close: Readers’ integration of information sources as a function of their disagreement

“…De Pereyra, Britt, et al (2014), for example, have reported that readers remember sources involved in the situation (e.g., a witness) better than remote sources (e.g., someone commenting the topic from a distance). A similar effect has also been reported by Graesser, Bowers, Olde, and Pomeroy (1999) regarding the representation of agents associated with a text. At the same time, we cannot rule out the possibility that source-to-source linking develops strategically during reading under some conditions.…”

When goals collide: Monitoring the goals of multiple characters

“…In support of this prediction, Graesser and his colleagues have shown that a narrative agent's salience in the discourse mediates the extent to which readers monitor their knowledge states (Graesser, Bowers, Olde, White, & Person, 1999) and remember their dialogue (Graesser, Bowers, Olde, & Pomeroy, 1999). Although Graesser's research is relevant to the present study and this prediction, it is important to note that they did not study character goals.…”

“…Despite the fact that most narratives contain multiple characters interacting in a story world, relatively little research has been done that assesses the extent to which understanders monitor the concerns and construct elaborate representations of multiple characters (see Graesser, Bowers, Olde, & Pomeroy, 1999;Graesser, Bowers, Olde, White, & Person, 1999;Trabasso & Nickels, 1992). Although it seems reasonable that narrative understanding and appreciation require viewers and readers to keep track of multiple characters' goals, it is also likely that working memory constraints place limitations on one's ability to do so.…”

“…However, working memory constraints most likely limit the number of characters that one can monitor in any given story (Graesser, Bowers, Olde, & Pomeroy, 1999;Graesser, Bowers, Olde, White, & Person, 1999). Several factors potentially mediate the extent to which we monitor a character's goals.…”