Abstract
We carried out 4 experiments to explore the influence of motivational knowledge in activating expectations about interpersonal actions in story comprehension. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants read episodes in which the characters' relationships could be close, distant, or superficial, and 1 character was involved in a situation that required giving help to another. We found that the reading times of the phrase that expressed the interpersonal action (i.e., "Rudolph defended Bertha against the jokes") were shorter when readers read this sentence after the helping situation and a close relationship. In Experiments 3 and 4, we measured the naming latency times of the goal linked to the helping situation (i.e., "defend") in different places within the text. The results showed that the characters' relationship directly did not influence the latencies of naming the goal. The results are explained with reference to the debate between the constructionist and memory-based text theories.
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