Abstract
Personal pronouns have been shown to influence cognitive perspective taking during comprehension. Studies using single sentences found that 3rd person pronouns facilitate the construction of a mental model from an observer’s perspective, whereas 2nd person pronouns support an actor’s perspective. The direction of the effect for 1st person pronouns seems to depend on the situational context. In the present study, we investigated how personal pronouns influence discourse comprehension when people read fiction stories and if this has consequences for affective components like emotion during reading or appreciation of the story. We wanted to find out if personal pronouns affect immersion and arousal, as well as appreciation of fiction. In a natural reading paradigm, we measured electrodermal activity and story immersion, while participants read literary stories with 1st and 3rd person pronouns referring to the protagonist. In addition, participants rated and ranked the stories for appreciation. Our results show that stories with 1st person pronouns lead to higher immersion. Two factors—transportation into the story world and mental imagery during reading—in particular showed higher scores for 1st person as compared to 3rd person pronoun stories. In contrast, arousal as measured by electrodermal activity seemed tentatively higher for 3rd person pronoun stories. The two measures of appreciation were not affected by the pronoun manipulation. Our findings underscore the importance of perspective for language processing, and additionally show which aspects of the narrative experience are influenced by a change in perspective.
Highlights
Reading is a complex human behaviour in which several cognitive processes are involved
As immersion is a multidimensional concept, we analysed the standardized subscales of the immersion questionnaire separately in order to get a better understanding of which factors of immersion are affected by pronoun type, e.g. it is more likely that subscales directly related to the protagonist are more sensitive with regards to the main manipulation
The results show that stories with 1st person pronouns lead to higher levels of overall immersion as measured by the questionnaire, which is in line with our predictions
Summary
Reading is a complex human behaviour in which several cognitive processes are involved. We combined measuring Electrodermal Activity (EDA) with appreciation ratings and established questionnaires for narrative engagement, to investigate if and how arousal, immersion, and affective responses to reading fiction are affected by choice of personal pronouns referring to protagonists. Following the assumption that 1st person perspective facilitates a more immediate experience and identification [18,38], we expect that readers are more emotionally affected by 1st person perspective narratives and experience higher levels of immersion This should result in higher scores on the immersion questionnaires, especially on the subscales for emotional engagement, transportation, and attention. We expect that both immersion as a self-report measured by questionnaire response, as well as arousal as measured by EDA are higher when participants read 1st person perspective narratives. We had no clear expectations towards how reading behaviour and print exposure relate to immersion, arousal during reading, or appreciation
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