Linguistic consequences of event segmentation in visual narratives: implications for prominence

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis experiment uses comic-type visual narratives to investigate effects of event segmentation on the representation of causal events (with an agent and a patient) in discourse. Prior work leaves open the question of whether the prominence of entities and events in mental models of discourse can be dissociated. By presenting participants with one-panel vs. two-panel segmentations of the same event, we tested whether differences in event segmentation boost the prominence of the patient, the consequence event, or both, as reflected in people’s choices about what is mentioned next. The results show participants are more likely to mention consequences in two-panel than one-panel conditions, indicating that panel segmentation influences the cognitive prominence of event-level representations. However, we find no clear evidence for segmentation influencing the cognitive prominence of entities. This suggests language users separately track expectations about who is mentioned next and expectations about what kind of event is described next.