Point of view in narrative comprehension, memory, and production

Strategies of Discourse Comprehension

“…Stories can be analyzed as problem-solving tasks, where the protagonist faces sonic problem in the pursuit of his or her goals and has to find a way around it (Rumelhart, 1975). The events in a story that are directly on the path of relationships between the protagonist's initial state and goal state form the backbone of the story, and are thus considered particularly important by the reader and are recalled best (Black & Bower, 1980;de Beaugrande & Colby, 1979;Lehnert, 1980a). However, discourse understanding may rely on many other knowledge sources in content areas other than physical causality and human action.…”

“…On the one side there are the story grammarians, who postulate that narrative structures do have processing reality (Johnson & Mandler, 1980;Mandler, 1978;Mandler & Johnson, 1977Rumelhart, 1975Rumelhart, , 1980Thorndykc, 1977;Stein & Glenn, 1979). The opposing view is held by those psychologists and scholars from artificial intelligence who claim that such structures are theoretical artifacts which can or should be explained away or modeled in terms of the structure of actions, emphasizing such notions as motivation, purpose, intention, and goal (e.g., Black & Bower, 1980;Bruce, 1980;Schank & Abelson, 1977;Thorndyke & Yekovich, 1980). Black and Wilensky (1979) have argued that there is no theoretically interesting way of formulating grammars for narrative structt.res, and that the actual grammars proposed both in psychology and the theory of discourse cannot be called grammars.…”

“…These episodes can usually be formed both on the basis of narrative categories, as suggested by Kintsch and van Dijk (1975) and the story grammarians, and on the basis of the content of the story (e.g., Black & Bower, 1980). It is hard to disentangle the structure of human action from that of stories, but in sonic of the studies discussed in what follows this has been achieved to varying extents.…”

“…The hierarchical structures generated by story grammars predict recall, in that superordinate nodes tend to be recalled better than subordinate nodes (Thorndynake, 1977), but the semantic content of these nodes may override structural effects (Black & Bower. 1980).…”

“…An episode is a sequence of sentences dominated by a macroproposition. A number of authors have used the "episode" concept, or similar ones such as "paragraph," both in linguistics (e.g., Longacre, 1979;Hinds, 1979;van Dijk, 1982b) and in psychology (Black & Bower, 1980;Haberlandt, Berian, & Sandson, 1980). Episodes may be marked in different ways.…”