Taking Perspective: Personal Pronouns Affect Experiential Aspects of Literary Reading

Abstract

Personal pronouns have been shown to influence cognitive perspective taking during comprehension. Studies using single sentences found that 3rd person pronouns facilitate the construction of a mental model from an observer’s perspective, whereas 2nd person pronouns support an actor’s perspective. The direction of the effect for 1st person pronouns seems to depend on the situational context. In the present study, we investigated how personal pronouns influence discourse comprehension when people read fiction stories and if this has consequences for affective components like emotion during reading or appreciation of the story. We wanted to find out if personal pronouns affect immersion and arousal, as well as appreciation of fiction. In a natural reading paradigm, we measured electrodermal activity and story immersion, while participants read literary stories with 1st and 3rd person pronouns referring to the protagonist. In addition, participants rated and ranked the stories for appreciation. Our results show that stories with 1st person pronouns lead to higher immersion. Two factors—transportation into the story world and mental imagery during reading—in particular showed higher scores for 1st person as compared to 3rd person pronoun stories. In contrast, arousal as measured by electrodermal activity seemed tentatively higher for 3rd person pronoun stories. The two measures of appreciation were not affected by the pronoun manipulation. Our findings underscore the importance of perspective for language processing, and additionally show which aspects of the narrative experience are influenced by a change in perspective.

Getting lost in a story: how narrative engagement emerges from narrative perspective and individual differences in alexithymia

“…In line with the previous literature (Hartung et al, 2016), we predicted that participants would display more narrative engagement for stories that were written in a first-person perspective than for stories that were written in a third-person perspective. Furthermore, we predicted that participants with higher levels of alexithymia would display less narrative engagement than participants with lower levels of alexithymia.…”

“…As far as we know, this notion has been empirically tested in only one study to date. In this study, participants were asked to read literary stories that were written from either a first or a third person perspective (Hartung, Burke, Hagoort, & Willems, 2016). The findings showed that participants reported higher narrative engagement during stories that were written in a first-person perspective than for stories written in a third-person perspective.…”

Dutch Author Recognition Test

“…The scores correlated r = .26 with empathy for depression (N = 210 students) and r = .11 with empathy for grief. Koopman's (2015) test was also used by Hartung, Burke, Hagoort, and Willems (2016), but seems to have been involved in one significant correlation only, namely the appreciation of the stories read (p < .05). Unfortunately, in neither article was information given about the reliability of the ART scores, so that it is difficult to evaluate the quality of the test.…”

The Fictive Brain: Neurocognitive Correlates of Engagement in Literature

“…It is still unclear what the nature of the images evoked during literary reading is, how exactly they influence our reading experience, and how they impact appreciation and memory for narratives (but see Hartung et al, 2016). An important avenue for future research is to add to our understanding of the impact of our propensity for simulation on our fiction experience, for example, the dependence of LRI simulation on personal experiences (e.g., Burke, 2011).…”