Narrative tasks

In chapter 3, we considered how listeners made sense of expressions used to refer to features in a static visual display where the only salient relations were spatial relations. To understand adequately the instructions given by the A-role speaker, a B-role listener had to locate a feature which was appropriately characterised by As description and ensure that it was in a location situated within a plausible search field. As we saw again in chapter 4, it was frequently the case that B could make sense of an underspecified message from A by locating a feature plausibly characterised by the denotation of the referring expression within a constrained search field, where the location is viewed by the listener from a particular perspective which is (largely) shared with the speaker.

We turn now to a different type of task, one which looks initially simple, but which turns out to be far more demanding for participants than the Map task. In the temporally structured task which I shall describe here, there are no enduring external aids to memory, no external model world whose stable features can be consulted, as in the Map task. Participants watch short episodes from a silent narrative which they see only once, enacted before them on a video screen. They then learn details of a further episode of the narrative which they were not shown, but which help them to interpret their own experience as they hear fellow participants talk about them.