Readers of narratives take the protagonist’s geographical perspective. Evidence from an event-related potential study

Regional accents modulate perspective in geographical space

“…Meanwhile, it is important to mention that the geographical perspective hypothesis was also supported by prior EEG experiments, which identified the N400 component associated with congruence, induced by the deictic verb and the geographical place ( de Vega et al, 2015;García-Marco et al, 2016). In those studies, participants read motion sentences similar to those used here either without an explicit deictic reference ( de Vega et al, 2015) or with a character's brief narrative context (García-Marco et al, 2016). Interestingly, the results of both studies showed a geographical perspective effect: "coming to distant places" elicited larger N400-like component compared to "coming to close places" or "going to distant places".…”

“…For instance, Brunyé et al (2009) found that first-person short paragraphs induced self-perspective, whereas providing some information about the first-person narrator induced readers to shift to an external or other-person perspective. In the same way, García-Marco et al (2016) provided readers with descriptions of fictional characters and their place of residence, and they found that readers were able to consistently take their perspective. However, this experiment shows for the first time that listeners can rely on a paralinguistic cue to shift from their own perspective to the other-person perspective.…”

“…Therefore, deictic words like 'I', 'come', or 'tomorrow' would refer respectively to the fictitious speaker, a motion toward her, and the day after the narrative present. The cognitive processes of a deictic shift are complex; they have been theoretically discussed (Galbraith, 1995 ; Segal, 1995 ) and empirically explored in a few studies (Black et al, 1979 ; García-Marco et al, 2016 ; Zwaan, 2004 ). However, an ERP study performed in our laboratory demonstrated that in some circumstances, readers could use their own geographical deictic center to understand deictic expressions (de Vega et al, 2015 ).…”

“…The hypothesis was that the local accent would induce the default geographical self-perspective, whereas the distant-region accent would induce a deictic shift to the speaker's geographical perspective. The critical sentences described the character's motion using two Spanish proximal deictic verbs: 'venir' (herein 'come') already explored in previous studies (de Vega et al, 2015 ; García-Marco et al, 2016 ), and included for the first time 'traer' ('bring'). The verb 'come' is intransitive, referring just to a person's body displacement; by contrast, 'bring' is a transitive verb that implies an object's displacement generally associated with a person's motion.…”

“…Concerning the role of the grammatical person in perspective-taking, we have seen above that second-person sentences induce the reader or listener to use self-perspective, and third-person narratives guide readers to take the other-person perspective (de Vega et al, 2015 ; García-Marco et al, 2016 ). By contrast, first-person sentences are more ambiguous, as they could be interpreted as referring to the participant's self or to an external narrator's self, depending on specific contextual cues.…”