Situation Model Construction Research Articles

Positioning the reader: the effect of narrative point-of-view and familiarity of experience on situation model construction

abstractPrevious research suggests that situation model construction may be influenced by a reader’s ability to embody the first-person perspective of the protagonist, including character emotions, during online comprehension. This study examined the effect of narrative point-of-view and readers’ own prior personal experience on reading engagement and comprehension. Participants read eighty short story passages on a computer screen, each describing either a familiar or an unfamiliar event. Stories were written in the first or third person, and either featured or did not feature a shift in protagonist emotions in the last sentence of the text. The results indicated that the use of third-person narrative point-of-view had an overall effect on reading engagement and enhanced readers’ ability to monitor changing character emotions. First-person narrative point-of-view, however, promoted protagonist empathy when participants read about unfamiliar events. The results also provide support for the conclusion that readers were more engaged with the story and constructed more effective situation models when they had prior personal experience of story events.

Working memory, situation models, and synesthesia.

Research on language comprehension suggests a strong relationship between working memory span measures and language comprehension. However, there is also evidence that this relationship weakens at higher levels of comprehension, such as the situation model level. The current study explored this relationship by comparing 10 grapheme-color synesthetes who have additional color experiences when they read words that begin with different letters and 48 normal controls on a number of tests of complex working memory capacity and processing at the situation model level. On all tests of working memory capacity, the synesthetes outperformed the controls. Importantly, there was no carryover benefit for the synesthetes for processing at the situation model level. This reinforces the idea that although some aspects of language comprehension are related to working memory span scores, this applies less directly to situation model levels. This suggests that theories of working memory must take into account this limitation, and the working memory processes that are involved in situation model construction and processing must be derived.

Neural correlates and network connectivity underlying narrative production and comprehension: A combined fMRI and PET study

The neural correlates of narrative production and comprehension remain poorly understood. Here, using positron emission tomography (PET), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), contrast and functional network connectivity analyses we comprehensively characterize the neural mechanisms underlying these complex behaviors. Eighteen healthy subjects told and listened to fictional stories during scanning. In addition to traditional language areas (e.g., left inferior frontal and posterior middle temporal gyri), both narrative production and comprehension engaged regions associated with mentalizing and situation model construction (e.g., dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, precuneus and inferior parietal lobules) as well as neocortical premotor areas, such as the pre-supplementary motor area and left dorsal premotor cortex. Narrative comprehension alone showed marked bilaterality, activating right hemisphere homologs of perisylvian language areas. Narrative production remained predominantly left lateralized, uniquely activating executive and motor-related regions essential to language formulation and articulation. Connectivity analyses revealed strong associations between language areas and the superior and middle temporal gyri during both tasks. However, only during storytelling were these same language-related regions connected to cortical and subcortical motor regions. In contrast, during story comprehension alone, they were strongly linked to regions supporting mentalizing. Thus, when employed in a more complex, ecologically-valid context, language production and comprehension show both overlapping and idiosyncratic patterns of activation and functional connectivity. Importantly, in each case the language system is integrated with regions that support other cognitive and sensorimotor domains.

Processing of situational information in story problem texts. An analysis from on-line measures.

In three experiments, we investigated the extent to which readers process information related to the construction of a situation model when they are confronted with solving word problems. Considering that generation of inferences to match actions with particular goals is part of constructing of the situation model, we constructed "rich story problems", that is, word problems included in the context of a story, in which the characters propose goals, and then these goals are followed by actions to achieve it. In Experiments 1 and 2 the story problems were designed so that the character's goal was related to the activation of a problem schema, either explicitly (Experiment 1) or implicitly (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3 the problem schema activation was clearly separated from the goal information. In all three experiments, goal information availability was assessed by on-line measures. The results showed that participants processed situational information by keeping track of characters' goals. These results fit nicely with those studies that emphasize the role of situation model construction in word problem solving.

The Interaction Between Temporal and Spatial Information in the Updating of Situation Model

Situation models refer to discourse representations that capture aspects of a micro-world created by the reader. They include five dimensions: temporality, spatiality, causality, intentionality, and protagonist. Researchers have tended to focus on the construction of situation models from a single dimension perspective. In earlier studies, researchers explored the effects of temporal or spatial information, but more recently some have redirected their attention to the interaction of temporal or spatial information with the other three dimensions of situational models. However, no experimental studies have examined the relationship between temporal and spatial information. The primary purpose of this study was to explore the interaction between temporal and spatial information. Time is linear and continuous, but space is three-dimensional and discontinuous. There were three possible relations between time and space, which were independent, inhibitory and facilitating. So, the secondary purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between temporal and spatial information in situation model processing. Ninety-seven college students participated in this study: 36 in Experiment 1, 37 in Experiment 2, and 24 in Experiment 3. In Experiment 1 we explored the relationship between temporal and spatial information when time and space dimension shifted simultaneously. In Experiment 2 we examined the interaction between timeand space when the temporal dimension and spatial dimension shifted serially. In Experiment 3, which included bilingual student proficient in English and Chinese, we used English texts to test the possible interference caused by the habits of language expression to further explore the interaction of temporal and spatial information when the time and space dimension shifted serially. Results of Experiment 1 indicated that reading time was shorter when temporal and spatial information shifted simultaneously than when either the temporal or spatial dimension shifted. This finding suggested a facilitating effect between temporal and spatial information. Results of Experiment 2 showed that when temporal and spatial information shifted and the temporal dimension shifted first, reading time was shorter than when only one dimension shifted. This finding suggested that the shift in the temporal dimension had a facilitating effect on the shift in spatial information. Results of Experiment 3 were similar to those of Experiment 1, but also showed that the time dimension had a more significant facilitating effect on the processing of the spatial information shift. In sum, we found that when temporal and spatial information shifted simultaneously there was a facilitating effect between the two dimensional shifts, but that the facilitating effect of the temporal dimension on the spatial dimension was stronger than that of the spatial dimension on the temporal dimension. We also found that when temporal and spatial information shifted serially, only temporal information had a significant facilitating effect on the space dimension. However, this effect was found only with bilingual students using Chinese materials. When bilingual students read English materials, there was a mutual facilitating effect between the two dimensional shifts, but the temporal dimension had a more facilitating effect on the spatial dimension. Together, the results showed that the updating of temporal and spatial information in situation models is bound together. The results are discussed in terms of binding-expectancy hypothesis.

Distinguishing different fictional worlds during sentence comprehension: ERP evidence

The neural mechanism of distinguishing reality from fiction has been explored recently. While people only represent one real world, they are likely to have representations for multiple fictional worlds. This study used event-related potentials to investigate how different fictional events were distinguished during sentence comprehension. Participants read fictional events involving real people (e.g., President Bush) or unreal characters (e.g., Lord Voldemort). Inconsistency of reality was created by introducing real people into the events involving unreal characters or introducing unreal characters into the events involving real people. The results indicated that inconsistency in reality in both types of fictional events elicited a late positive effect, and an interaction between event type and consistency effect was found in medial sites. These results suggested that reality information is important for the construction and updating of situation models.

Conceptual Change, Text Comprehension and Eye Movements During Reading

In the two studies presented in this article, we examine the interplay of conceptual change, text comprehension, and eye-movements during reading and develop and test methods suitable for such explorations. In studies 1 and 2, university students (N = 15 and 23) read a text on photosynthesis, explained their reading processes retrospectively cued with their own gaze videos, and answered written pre- and posttests. In Study 1, a case study demonstrated connections between re-readings and high-level cognitive processing. Out of all of the participants' retrospective reports, categories were formed based on the expressions referring to either situation model or textbase construction during reading. In Study 2, conceptual change learners differed from other learner groups in terms of prolonged overall reading time and a relatively high amount of expressing textbase construction at the beginning of the retrospective reporting. The results emphasise the importance of careful construction of the textbase in conceptual change and point to the benefits of complementing the eye tracking with cued retrospective reporting when examining high-level cognitive processes during reading.

Starting from scratch and building brick by brick in comprehension

During narrative comprehension, readers construct representations of the situation described by a text, called situation models. Theories of situation model construction and event comprehension posit two distinct types of situation model updating: incremental updating of individual situational dimensions, and global updates in which an old model is abandoned and a new one created. No research to date has directly tested whether readers update their situation models incrementally, globally, or both. We investigated whether both incremental and global updating occur during narrative comprehension. Participants typed what they were thinking while reading an extended narrative, and then segmented the narrative into meaningful events. Each typed think-aloud response was coded for whether it mentioned characters, objects, space, time, goals, or causes. There was evidence for both incremental and global updating: Readers mentioned situation dimensions more when those dimensions changed, controlling for the onset of a new event. Readers also mentioned situation dimensions more at points when a new event began than during event middles, controlling for the presence of situational change. These results support theories that claim that readers engage in both incremental and global updating during extended narrative comprehension.

The Role of Intention in the Construction and Updating of Situation Model

This paper examines the role of intention in the construction and updating of situation models. In the experiment, we studied readers’ reaction to three versions of situations (consistent, inconsistent and deviously consistent). By repeated measure ANOVA anaylysis, the present study concludes that readers follow the protagnist’s intention to construct and update situation models. Readers’ English proficiency significantly affects readers’ text processing in deviously consistent and inconsistent situation models.

The effects of instruction on situation model construction: an eye fixation study on text comprehension in primary school children

This study examined whether the formation of a situation model can be encouraged by a situation‐focused instruction in primary school children. To achieve this, the standard reading‐for‐comprehension instruction was adapted so that it would emphasise the importance of imagination in narrative text comprehension. The results showed that the situational instruction enhanced the situation model construction abilities in good comprehenders in such a way that it improved not only their memory for the situation model but also the ease with which they filled in the gaps in time and space that appeared in the narratives. In poor comprehenders, the situational instruction led to a redistribution of attentional resources allocated to textbase‐ and situation‐level processing. It was suggested that this caused them to go beyond encoding the explicit text and instead construct a situation model from it, and that they did so without enriching the model with general‐knowledge inferences as much as good comprehenders.

Zur Rolle des Situationsmodells beim mathematischen Modellieren – Aufgabenanalysen, Schülerkompetenzen und Lehrerinterventionen

In a study within the DISUM research project, we investigated the role that the construction of situation models plays as an essential prerequisite for understanding a given mathematical modelling task, using a sample of 21 9th grade classes (N=416). Specific task characteristics, general mathematical competence, reading competence, and teacher interventions aiming at understanding the situation model were analyzed as crucial factors influencing students’ ability to solve modelling tasks. The results show that: (1) strategies for constructing an adequate situation model have a significant influence on modelling competence, (2) mathematical reading competence and intra-mathematical competence can explain almost one third of the variance of the performance on the modelling test, (3) teacher interventions may encourage students to adopt strategies facilitating the construction of situation models, but an increase of modelling competence requires separate strategy training.

Aspectual asymmetries in the mental representation of events: Role of lexical and grammatical aspect

Temporal information is important in the construction of situation models, and many languages make use of perfective and imperfective aspect markers to distinguish between completed situations (e.g., He made a cake) and ongoing situations (e.g., He is making a cake). Previous studies in which the effect of grammatical aspect has been examined have shown that perfective sentences are often processed more quickly than imperfective ones (e.g., Chan, Yap, Shirai, & Matthews, 2004; Madden & Zwaan, 2003; Yap et al., 2004; Yap et al., 2006). However, these studies used only accomplishment verbs (i.e., verbs with an inherent endpoint, such as bake a cake). The present study on the processing of Cantonese includes activity verbs (i.e., durative verbs with no inherent endpoint, such as play the piano), and the results indicate a strong interaction between lexical aspect (i.e., verb type) and grammatical aspect. That is, perfective sentences were processed more quickly with accomplishment verbs, consistent with previous findings, but imperfective sentences were processed more quickly with activity verbs. We suggest that these different aspectual asymmetries emerge as a result of the inherent associations between accomplishment verbs and the bounded features of perfective aspect and between activity verbs and the unbounded features of imperfective aspect. The sentence stimuli from this study may be downloaded from mc.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.

Contextual Constraints in Situation Model Construction: An Investigation of Age and Reading Span

ABSTRACT This study examined the effects of age and reading span on the ability to use contextual constraints during language comprehension. Older and younger participants listened to sentences over headphones and named pictures that appeared subsequently. Older adults named pictures faster when the preceding sentence context matched rather than mismatched the shape of the depicted object, but younger adults showed less of a match advantage. This effect of contextual match was especially pronounced in older high-span participants, consistent with models of cognitive aging in which surface level processing declines in older adulthood whereas processing at the situation model level remains intact. Results suggest that the practiced ability to immediately construe word meanings and activate the appropriate stored representations is preserved, if not strengthened throughout the lifespan.

Verb aspect, event structure, and coreferential processing

We used an off-line story continuation task and an online ERP reading task to investigate coreferential processing following sentences that portrayed transfer-of-possession events as either ongoing or completed, using imperfective and perfective verb aspect (e.g., Amanda was shifting/shifted some poker chips to Scott). The story continuation task demonstrated that people were more likely to begin continuations with references to the Goal than to the Source, but that perfective aspect strengthened this bias. In the ERP task we probed expectations for Source and Goal referents by employing pronouns that matched one of the referents in gender. The ERP results were consistent with the biases revealed in the story continuation task and demonstrate that the difference in Goal bias for the two forms of aspect was manifested differently in the brain. These results provide novel behavioral and neurocognitive evidence that verb aspect influences the construction of situation models during language comprehension.

Reading between the lines

This paper presents an overview of the activation of background knowledge during text comprehension. We first review the cognitive processes involved in the activation of inferences during text comprehension, stressing the interaction between text and reader in the construction of situation models. Second, we review evidence for embodied theories of cognition and discuss how this new framework can inform our understanding of the nature and role of background knowledge. We then review the neuropsychological data on the activation of background knowledge during text comprehension. Finally, the paper presents existing and future challenges in researching the role of background knowledge both at a conceptual and a methodological level.

Lexical patterns in L2 textual gist identification assessment

Gist identification or coherent situation model construction performance is an important criterion not only in L1 and L2 reading comprehension assessment but also in every aspect of discourse processing. Whereas most previous L2 research has investigated schematic knowledge of readers about relations within a text, more recent studies have used models of comprehension that also pay attention to external reference and world knowledge. The present study proposes a way to assess gist identification by L2 readers using Hoey's (1991) theory of networks of repetition of lexical items including morphologically similar words and paraphrases of keywords containing the gist of a text. Based on Hoey's tax-onomy, two models were tested. One, following Kintsch (e.g. 1998), assessed the ability to identify the gist of a text using minimal lookbacks. The other encouraged multiple lookbacks. The second model, which involved more reader involvement in finding referential relationships within a text, resulted in more detailed understanding of gist.

Neural substrates of narrative comprehension and memory

When reading a narrative, comprehension and retention of information benefit considerably from the use of situation models — coherent representations of the characters, locations, and activities described in the text. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore the neural mechanisms supporting situation model processing. Participants read blocks of sentences that were either unrelated to one another or formed coherent narratives. A timecourse-based approach was used to identify regions that differentiated narrative-level comprehension from sentence-level comprehension. Most brain regions that showed modulation of activation during narrative-level comprehension were also modulated to a lesser extent during sentence-level comprehension, suggesting a shared reliance on general coherence-building mechanisms. However, tentative evidence was found for narrative-specific activation in dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. Additional analyses identified spatiotemporally distinct neural contributions to situation model processing, with posterior parietal regions supporting situation model construction and frontotemporal regions supporting situation model maintenance. Finally, a set of subsequent memory analyses demonstrated that the boost in comprehension and memory performance observed for coherent materials was attributable to the use of integrative situation models rather than lower-level differences in sentence-level or word-level encoding. These results clarify the functional contributions of distinct brain systems to situation model processing and their mapping onto existing psychological models of narrative comprehension.

A model of comprehension in spina bifida meningomyelocele: Meaning activation, integration, and revision

Spina bifida meningomyelocele (SBM) is a neurodevelopmental disorder associated with adequate development of word reading and single word comprehension, but deficient text and discourse comprehension. Studies of comprehension in children with SBM are reviewed in relation to a comprehension model in which meanings are either activated from the surface code or constructed through resource-intensive integration and revision processes to form representations of the text base and models of the situation described by the text. Two new studies probed the construction of situation models in SBM. Experiment 1 tested the ability to build spatial and affective situation models from single sentences in 86 children with SBM (8 to 18 years of age) and 37 control children (8 to 16 years of age). Experiment 2 tested the ability to integrate across sentences to build spatial situation models in 15 children with SBM and 15 age-matched controls. Compared to age peers, children with SBM did not construct situation models that required integration of information across sentences, even though they could construct such models from single sentences. The data bear on the distinctive SBM neurocognitive profile, and more generally, on the significance of integration processes for the constructive aspects of language comprehension.

Processing and Representing Temporal Information in Narrative Text

According to current theories in discourse research, readers monitor a series of 5 situational dimensions during narrative comprehension (Zwaan, Langston, & Graesser, 1995; Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998). 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.

Processing and Representing Temporal Information in Narrative Text

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.