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Starting from scratch and building brick by brick in comprehension

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Abstract

During narrative comprehension, readers construct representations of the situation described by a text, called situation models. Theories of situation model construction and event comprehension posit two distinct types of situation model updating: incremental updating of individual situational dimensions, and global updates in which an old model is abandoned and a new one created. No research to date has directly tested whether readers update their situation models incrementally, globally, or both. We investigated whether both incremental and global updating occur during narrative comprehension. Participants typed what they were thinking while reading an extended narrative, and then segmented the narrative into meaningful events. Each typed think-aloud response was coded for whether it mentioned characters, objects, space, time, goals, or causes. There was evidence for both incremental and global updating: Readers mentioned situation dimensions more when those dimensions changed, controlling for the onset of a new event. Readers also mentioned situation dimensions more at points when a new event began than during event middles, controlling for the presence of situational change. These results support theories that claim that readers engage in both incremental and global updating during extended narrative comprehension.

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Notes

  1. In the present study, participants typed their thoughts rather than reported them aloud. However, in order to stay consistent with the literature, we use the term “think-aloud” to refer to the verbal reports we collected.

  2. Work in verbal protocol analysis in comprehension has shown that typing has minimal effects on thought quality, relative to spoken-aloud thoughts (Muñoz, Magliano, Sheridan, & McNamara, 2006).

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Author note

Preparation of the manuscript was partially supported by Grants T32 AG000030-31 and RO1-MH70674 from the National Institutes of Health.

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  1. Department of Psychology, Grand Valley State University, 2224 Au Sable Hall, Allendale, MI, 49401, USA

    Christopher A. Kurby

  2. Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA

    Jeffrey M. Zacks

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Correspondence to Christopher A. Kurby.

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Kurby, C.A., Zacks, J.M. Starting from scratch and building brick by brick in comprehension. Mem Cogn 40, 812–826 (2012). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-011-0179-8

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