Processing and Representing Temporal Information in Narrative Text

Abstract

Abstract According to current theories in discourse research, readers monitor a series of 5 situational dimensions during narrative comprehension (Zwaan, Langston, & Graesser, 1995 Zwaan, R. A., Langston, M. C. and Graesser, A. C. 1995. The construction of situation models in narrative comprehension: an event-indexing model. Psychological Science, 6: 292–297. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998 Zwaan, R. A. and Radvansky, G. A. 1998. Situation models in language comprehension and memory. Psychological Bulletin, 123: 162–185. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). These dimensions are time (e.g., the order of events), space (e.g., locations), protagonist (e.g., main character actions), causality (e.g., how one event influences another event), and intentionality (e.g., goals). These experiments were designed to further explore how readers process and represent time (duration) in situation-model construction. In 3 experiments, we examined how duration-related inconsistencies influenced processing time and processing strategies. Results indicate that readers routinely monitor the duration of events and detect temporal inconsistencies even when temporal information is implicitly presented. This provides evidence for the representation of duration information in situation models.