Not all narrative shifts function equally

Readers of narratives keep track of narrative events and the information associated with these events. Does some of this associated information help structure the processing of and memory for the narrative? In three experiments, we examined the role of basic event building blocks (character, time, and location) in event indexing during text comprehension. These three experiments dealt with perceived coherence, perceived cohesion, and on-line processing, respectively. The results indicated that characters are more likely to serve as event indexes. Although the findings with respect to indexing were similar in all three experiments, interesting differences emerged as a function of the level of text comprehension examined (coherence, cohesion, or on-line processing).     

Age differences in tracking characters during narrative comprehension

Understanding a narrative situation depends on keeping track of multiple characters that enter and exit dynamically as the plot unfolds. We investigated age differences in this process during narrative comprehension. In Experiment 1, we used a probe recognition paradigm to examine the effect of age on the accessibility of a previous character when another character was subsequently introduced. In Experiment 2, reading time was measured to examine age differences in the encoding of a new character after another had already been introduced. Our findings show that older readers have particular difficulty both in accessing the initial character after a new character is introduced and in thoroughly encoding a new character while other characters inhabit the discourse world. We attribute these differences to age differences in working memory that make it difficult to access a backgrounded character when a new character is in focus and to distinctively encode a new character when maintenance of another character is already consuming attentional resources.     

Influence of Question Format and Text Availability on the Assessment of Expository Text Comprehension

This study examines how passage availability and reading comprehension question format (open-ended vs. multiple-choice) influence question answering. In two experiments, college undergraduates read an expository passage and answered open-ended and multiple-choice versions of text-based, local, and global bridging inference questions. Half the participants were allowed to refer to the passage when answering the questions and half were not. Participants' prior domain knowledge relating to the text contents was assessed using multiple-choice and open-ended questions. Correlation-based analyses in the two experiments indicated: (a) a decline in the relationship between prior domain knowledge and comprehension when the passage was available during question answering; and (b) a high correlation between multiple-choice and open-ended question answering performance when the passage was not available for reference. Overall the results indicate that the nature of the reading comprehension assessment is influenced by the specific task with which comprehension is assessed.     

Interactive dimensions in the construction of mental representations for text

To detail the structure and format of memory for texts, researchers have examined whether readers monitor separate text dimensions for space, time, and characters. The authors proposed that the interactivity between these individual dimensions may be as critical to the construction of complex mental models as the discrete dimensions themselves. In the present experiments, participants read stories in which characters were described as traveling from a start to a final location. During movement between locations, characters engaged in activities that could take either a long or short amount of time to complete. Results indicate that accessibility for the spatial locations was a function of the passage of time. The authors interpret this as evidence that the interactive nature of text dimensions affects the structure of representations in memory.     

时间距离对记叙文倒叙信息表征的影响

采用移动窗口技术和探测——再认范式探讨了时间距离对记叙文倒叙信息表征的影响。本研究分为两个实验：实验1考察了在近时间距离条件下读者如何表征倒叙信息,结果发现读者会根据时间顺序,把倒叙信息整合到他们的表征中去,支持时间顺序假设;实验2考察了在远时间距离条件下读者如何表征倒叙信息,结果发现读者会根据文本叙述顺序,将倒叙信息作为背景信息整合到该事件中去,支持背景假设。上述结果表明,时间距离是影响读者如何对倒叙信息进行表征的重要因素。     

Aging, expertise, and narrative processing.

In a study of how aviation expertise influences age differences in narrative processing, young and older pilots and nonpilots read and recalled aviation and general narratives. They chose referents for sentences referring to a protagonist or minor character mentioned 1 sentence (recent character) or 3 sentences (distant character) before this target sentence. All groups chose referents less accurately for sentences about distant and minor characters than about recent and protagonist characters, perhaps because these referents were less likely to be in working memory. Young readers and pilots were more accurate for distant and minor character target sentences in aviation narratives, and recalled aviation narratives more accurately. Expertise did not reduce age differences. Expertise differences may reflect decreased demands on working memory capacity, and age declines may reflect reduced capacity.     

The collective past,group psychology and personal narrative: Shaping Jewish identity by memoirs of the Holocaust

Through honing its collective memory, especially after the Holocaust, the Jewish community has attempted to sustain its culture, bolster the Jewish identity of its members, and regain a resolute sense that its narrative is again proceeding. To some degree, all these aims are realized by instilling in its members the Jewish modal character structure: a psychological configuration with two contrastable entities. One chronically discomposed self-structure, defining itself as polluted and helpless, trembles with the appalling imagery of historical and imminent community disasters. The other entity believes in its unmatched capacity for reparative, socially beneficial actions. The paradigm of this psychological organization is found in many children of survivors. The memory of a tragic history abides alongside the community's hopes in the Jewish modal personality. The need to set forth and accommodate these two motifs imprints upon the Jewish "national" character many of its distinctive qualities. The designs of the Jewish community for this particularly Jewish twofold personality formation are augmented by the personal revelations of survivors. Therefore, Holocaustic testimonies are invested with a sacred aura. In measure, these recitals of the disaster with their stark images, plus the clashing affects aroused in the reader toward main characters of the narrative, dictate the way Jews define themselves in the world and the way they live. A confluence of being covertly commissioned by the Jewish community joins with the narrators' more idiosyncratic longings. Together they generate a steady stream of Holocaustic accounts. Complementary vectors drive the reader to peruse these records. The results therefrom, intimate knowledge of the disaster, plus the twofold personality motifs stamp many Jews as scions of the Holocaust.     

劣化部位对汉字识别的影响

首先自创“调制计算机显示法”制作视觉质量不佳的劣化汉字,后经识别实验的视觉检验,已论证此法的简便性和有效性。运用此法进行了两项劣化不同部位的识别实验,分别获得“劣化字的整合识别成绩与其劣化部位无关”的结果,并就此探讨了劣化条件下汉字的加工方式的整体性。     

The influence of types of character on processing background information in narrative discourse

The background sentenceThe air was cold and clammy depicts setting information which may or may not be of significance to a given character in a narrative. We tested the hypothesis that such information is processed with respect to the main character in a narrative rather than with respect to a secondary character. In Experiment 1, subjects making attributions of awareness of such background states were more likely to attribute such awareness to main than to secondary characters. In Experiment 2, using self-paced reading, we showed that such information is more important for main than for secondary characters during reading. Thus, unattached background information is processed with respect to main characters. This bias provides a source of control over the processing necessary to establish a coherent representation during the reading of narratives. Experiment 3 eliminated the possibility that the effects were due to generally shallower processing of sentences centered on secondary characters.     

Flying to Neverland: How readers tacitly judge norms during comprehension

As readers gain experience with specific narrative worlds, they accumulate information that allows them to experience events as normal or unusual within those worlds. In this article, we contrast two accounts for how readers access information about specific narrative worlds to make tacit judgments of normalcy. We conducted two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants read stories about an ordinary character (e.g., a police officer in Boston) or a familiar fantastic character (e.g., Superman). Each story described a realistic event (e.g., the character being killed by bullets) or a fantastic event (e.g., bullets bouncing off the character’s chest). Participants were faster to read events that were consistent with their prior knowledge about the story world. In Experiments 2a and 2b, participants read stories about familiar fantastic characters, unfamiliar fantastic characters (e.g., a Kryptonian named Dev-em), and unfamiliar ordinary characters. In Experiment 2a, participants were equally fast to read about the familiar and unfamiliar fantastic characters experiencing fantastic events, both of which were read faster than the unfamiliar ordinary characters sentences. In Experiment 2b, participants were fastest to read about unfamiliar ordinary characters experiencing realistic events and were equally slow for familiar and unfamiliar fantastic characters. Our experiments provide evidence that readers routinely use inductive reasoning to go beyond their prior knowledge when reading fictional narratives, affecting whether they experience events as normal or unusual.     

Character movement and the representation of space during narrative comprehension

Traditional research on situation models has examined the accessibility of locations and objects during narrative experiences. These studies have described a ubiquitous gradient effect: Spatial locations and objects in reader focus are more accessible than locations farther from this focus, with accessibility decreasing as a function of distance. How might readers’ expectations about character movement, beyond information about spatial locations, additionally affect this accessibility gradient? In two experiments, we investigated whether reader expectations for character movement impact the accessibility of spatial information from memory. In Experiment 1, participants read stories that described characters moving in either a unidirectional or a random pattern through a learned environment. In Experiment 2, characters moved forward in a unidirectional way or backtracked through previously explored rooms. The results suggest that reader expectations for character movement can influence the accessibility of spatial information. Such expectations play a critical role in processes of narrative comprehension.     

Deviation from hierarchical structure in recall: Is there an “optimal” structure?

Past research has suggested that proportionally more superordinate than sub-ordinate propositions are recalled from expository texts, following a hierarchical analysis of the text structure. Since free recall has typically followed this hierarchical pattern, several researchers have assumed that the related memory structures are isomorphic to the text structure. However, few of these studies have examined how individual differences and text structure interact to affect free recall. In two experiments, the assumption of hierarchical patterns of children's recall of expository text was tested. In Experiment 1, high- and average-ability fourth graders (9 years old) were asked to read and recall a passage. Experiment 2 was a replication and extension of Experiment 1. In this experiment, fourth and sixth graders (9 and 11 years old) read and recalled a different passage. The combined results of both experiments support the notion that there is probably no one optimal hierarchical structure for storage and retrieval of expository text.     

Learning Plan Schemata from Observation: Explanation-Based Learning for Plan Recognition

This article discusses how explanation-based learning of plan schemata from observation can improve performance of plan recognition. The GENESIS program is presented as an implemented system for narrative text understanding that learns schemata and improves its performance. Learned schemata allow GENESIS to use schema-based understanding techniques when interpreting events and thereby avoid the expensive search associated with plan-based understanding. Learned schemata also function as new concepts that can be used to cluster examples and index events in memory. In addition, experiments are reviewed which demonstrate that human subjects, like GENESIS, con learn a schema by observing, explaining, and generalizing a single specific instance presented in a narrative.     

Out of sight,out of mind: Occlusion and the accessibility of information in narrative comprehension

Do readers encode the perceptual perspectives of characters during narrative comprehension? To address this question, we conducted two experiments using stories that sometimes described situations in which certain information was occluded from the protagonists’ views. We generated two related hypotheses concerning the potential impact of occlusion events on text representations. One, theevent boundary hypothesis, suggested that any salient narrative event would reduce the accessibility of prior story information. The second, theperceptual availability hypothesis, suggested that accessibility would decrease most for information no longer visible to story protagonists. In Experiment 1, the participants were slowest to respond to verification questions that asked about occluded information. In Experiment 2, we demonstrated that this effect did not extend to other, nonoccluded information. These results suggest that readers encode text information from the perceptual perspective of story protagonists. This is consistent with recent perceptual symbol views of language comprehension.     

A program for comprehension monitoring of text using HyperCard for the Macintosh

We describe a program using HyperCard for the Macintosh that allows the collection of several different types of text processing data in a realistic, natural, and unobtrusive experimental setting. The program allows a sentence-by-sentence presentation of text and allows unconstrained movement forward and backward through the text. Subjects can, at any point during reading, look back at individual sentences presented previously, or review all previously presented sentences at once. All sentence readings and rereadings are timed, and the sequence of readings, rereadings, and reviews is recorded. Following passage reading, questions are asked to examine comprehension and memory of the passage. The program is well suited for the examination of comprehension evaluation and regulation in readers, as well as for the examination of other comprehension and memory processes.