Managing Mental Representations During Narrative Comprehension

Abstract

Three experiments investigated how readers manage their mental representations during narrative comprehension. The first experiment investigated whether readers' access to their mental representations of the main character in a narrative becomes enhanced (producing a "benefit") when the character is rementioned; the first experiment also investigated whether readers' access to the main character in a narrative becomes weakened or interfered with (producing a "cost") when a new character is introduced. The purpose of the second experiment was to ensure that there was nothing unusually salient about the accessibility of names; thus, we assessed readers' access to an object associated with the main character rather than the character's name. Again, readers demonstrated increased accessibility to the main character when it was rementioned in the narrative, and readers demonstrated reduced accessibility to the main character when a new character was introduced. A third experiment compared more-skilled and less-skilled readers' abilities to manage these mental representations during narrative comprehension. Findings were consistent with research suggesting that more-skilled readers are more skilled at attenuating interfering information (i.e., suppression). Data from all 3 experiments suggest that successful narrative comprehension involves managing mental representations of salient and often times interfering characters.To successfully read and comprehend a story, readers must keep track of narrative details: Who is the main character? What does he or she look like? What is his or her role in the story? and so on. Moreover, most narratives are complex: they usually contain more than 1 episode, and more than one character participates in the events. The task of keeping track of

Interference control in children with reading difficulties

“…The current finding is consistent with a recent study where a different approach was taken and showed that children with specific reading decoding problems do not appear to have problems in controlling interfering information while performing working memory tasks when compared to groups of children known to have poor comprehension or ADHD (Palladino & Ferrari, 2013). These authors argue that, while poor comprehenders who are known to be less efficient to control for interfering information in passage reading (Cain, 2006;Gernsbacher, Robertson, Palladino, & Werner, 2004;Pimperton & Nation, 2010), poor decoders' difficulties is more related to their problems in phonological information processing.…”

Age differences in tracking characters during narrative comprehension

“…In order to determine the change in the accessibility of the initial character as a function of whether a new character has been introduced, probe response latency and error rates in verifying the name of the initial character (i.e., Patty) were measured. Gernsbacher et al (2004) found that, relative to the baseline condition, access to the initial character was slower and less accurate when a new character was introduced but was faster and more accurate when the character was rementioned.…”

“…An additional 3 young and 10 older adults were tested, but their data were removed for excessive comprehension errors (as is described below; cf. Gernsbacher et al, 2004).…”

“…We measured reading time to encode the target character as a function of these character conditions. Assuming that it takes resources to disengage from an existing character (suppression; as in Gernsbacher et al, 2004, and in Experiment 1 in this article) to instantiate a new character, we predicted that it would take longer to encode the target character if another character had already been introduced in the discourse (in the different condition, relative to the baseline condition) and that the effect would be greater for older adults.…”

Individual differences and emotional inferences during reading comprehension.

“…Gernsbacher et al (1992) concluded that readers do integrate specific emotions in their mental models while reading. These findings have been further supported by other studies investigating readers' inclusion of the main characters' affective status in their mental models (Gernsbacher, Hallada, & Robertson, 1998;Gernsbacher, Robertson, Palladino, & Werner, 2004;de Vega, Leon, & Diaz, 1996).Using short stories based on Gernsbacher et al (1992), Gygax, Oakhill, and Garnham (2003) and Gygax, Garnham, and Oakhill (2004) questioned the assumed notion of specificity (i.e., readers infer a specific emotion label and differentiate between similar emotions or merely infer a broader feeling). They showed that although participants were sensitive to congruence manipulations of target sentences containing emotion words (i.e., they read sentences containing congruent target emotion words faster than incongruent ones), they were equally fast when reading target sentences containing (a) Gernsbacher et al's initial emotion words (e.g., depressed), (b) emotion words synonymous to the original ones in Gernsbacher et al (e.g., miserable) and (c) emotional terms that were merely similar to them (e.g., useless).…”