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Abstract
Mental models or situation models include representations of people, but much of the literature about such models focuses on the representation of eventualities (events, states, and processes) or (small-scale) situations. In the well-known event-indexing model of Zwaan, Langston, and Graesser (1995), for example, protagonists are just one of five dimensions on which situation models are indexed. They are not given any additional special status. Consideration of longer narratives, and the ways in which readers or listeners relate to them, suggest that people have a more central status in the way we think about texts, and hence in discourse representations, Indeed, such considerations suggest that discourse representations are organised around (the representations of) central characters. The paper develops the idea of the centrality of main characters in representations of longer texts, by considering, among other things, the way information is presented in novels, with L’Éducation Sentimentale by Gustav Flaubert as a case study. Conclusions are also drawn about the role of representations of people in the representation of other types of text.
Highlights
The notion of a mental model of discourse (Johnson-Laird & Garnham, 1980), which developed from earlier ideas outlined by Johnson- Laird (1970), has proved a crucial one in the psychology of language
This latter aspect of discourse models has received relatively little attention, at least in the psycholinguistic literature. The former aspect – the representation of situations in the real world and in imaginary words – has become a staple of psycholinguistic research, under the heads of mental models (e.g., Johnson-Laird, 1983; Garnham, 1987, 2001) or situation models. It has been argued (Garnham, 1996) that, in a general sense, the notion of a mental model as the representation of the content of discourse follows from a Marrian task analysis of discourse comprehension, which shows that its function is, at least in part, to convey or receive information about parts of the real world, imaginary worlds, or abstract domains
Here we re-encounter one of the primary tenets of mental models theory: that the representations derived from texts and those derived from more direct observations, of various kinds, of the real world, are similar in form, and can be related to one another
Summary
In Stefan Gobel, Rainer Malkewitz and Ido Iurgel, editors, Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling, Third International Conference, pages 72-83. The other side of mental models: Theories of language comprehension. Oakhill and Alan Garnham, editors, Mental Models in Cognitive Science: Essays in Honour of Phil Johnson-Laird, pages 35-52. In Fritz Neubauer, editor, Coherence in Natural Language Texts, Papers in Text Linguistics, volume 38, pages 29-69. In John Lyons, editor, New horizons in linguistics, pages 261-270. Semantics of Natural Language, Formal Logic and Discourse Representation Theory. In Rainer Bauerle, Christoph Schwarze and Arnim von Stechow, editors, Meaning, Use, and Interpretation of Language, pages 250-. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 19(1):114. The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortions in the attribution process In Leonard Berkowitz, editor, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, volume. 2: New. Directions in Discourse Processing, pages 53-120. C. Graesser, editors, Models of Understanding Text, pages 241-255. Situation models in language comprehension and memory. Zwaan and Herre Van Oostendorp. (1993) Do readers construct spatial representations in naturalistic story comprehension? Discourse Processes, 16(1-2):125143
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