Abstract
Although various studies have shown that narrative reading draws on social-cognitive abilities, not much is known about the precise aspects of narrative processing that engage these abilities. We hypothesized that the linguistic processing of narrative viewpoint—expressed by elements that provide access to the inner world of characters—might play an important role in engaging social-cognitive abilities. Using eye tracking, we studied the effect of lexical markers of perceptual, cognitive, and emotional viewpoint on eye movements during reading of a 5,000-word narrative. Next, we investigated how this relationship was modulated by individual differences in social-cognitive abilities. Our results show diverging patterns of eye movements for perceptual viewpoint markers on the one hand, and cognitive and emotional viewpoint markers on the other. Whereas the former are processed relatively fast compared to non-viewpoint markers, the latter are processed relatively slow. Moreover, we found that social-cognitive abilities impacted the processing of words in general, and of perceptual and cognitive viewpoint markers in particular, such that both perspective-taking abilities and self-reported perspective-taking traits facilitated the processing of these markers. All in all, our study extends earlier findings that social cognition is of importance for story reading, showing that individual differences in social-cognitive abilities are related to the linguistic processing of narrative viewpoint.
Highlights
Reading might seem a rather solitary activity compared to engaging in social interaction, many scholars have argued that social-cognitive processes play an important role during story reading
Comprehension of verbs of emotion on a short-story task was significantly correlated to emotion understanding in a study with seven- to ten-yearolds (Ornaghi and Grazzani, 2013). These results indicate that individual differences in social-cognitive abilities are related to the linguistic processing of at least emotional and cognitive viewpoint markers in children, suggesting that social cognition and the processing of narrative viewpoint somehow go hand in hand
We found that Spontaneous Theory of Mind Protocol (STOMP) scores and Egocentric Intrusion decreased the odds of skipping, but these effects were not specific to viewpoint markers
Summary
Reading might seem a rather solitary activity compared to engaging in social interaction, many scholars have argued that social-cognitive processes play an important role during story reading. Despite research underlining the importance of social-cognitive abilities for story reading, it is not clear exactly what aspects of narrative processing require readers to put these abilities to work. There is relatively little research on the relationship between social-cognitive abilities and the processing of specific narrative characteristics. In this study we investigated how individual differences in readers’ social-cognitive abilities are related to a crucial aspect of narrative processing, namely the linguistic processing of narrative viewpoint. After introducing the multidimensional concept of narrative viewpoint, we will discuss why the linguistic processing of narrative viewpoint is likely related to readers’ socialcognitive abilities
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