Comprehending narratives containing flashbacks: evidence for temporally organized representations.
This study investigated the representations that readers construct for narratives describing a sequence of events. Participants read narratives describing 4 successive events in chronological order (Event 1, Event 2, Event 3, Event 4 [E1, E2, E3, E4] Experiment 1) or in nonchronological order with E1 being mentioned in a flashback (E2, E3, E1, E4; Experiments 2-4). The information about the duration of E2 was manipulated, and the mental accessibility of E1 was tested at the end of a passage. All 4 experiments showed that E1 was less accessible if the text implied that it occurred a relatively long time ago in the described world compared with when it occurred a shorter time ago. This result suggests that readers construct a temporally organized representation even if the text structure does not suggest such an organization.
Claus
Berry
B
Institute of Psychology, Technical University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany. clausb@rz.uni-potsdam.de
Kelter
Stephanie
S
D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D003210:Concept Formation / Q000502:physiology*; D016001:Confidence Intervals; D006801:Humans; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology*; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D013997:Time Factors