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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 February 2015

MELISSA MULCAHY  and
BETHANIE GOULDTHORP
MELISSA MULCAHY
Affiliation:
School of Psychology and Exercise Science, Murdoch University, Western Australia
BETHANIE GOULDTHORP*
Affiliation:
School of Psychology and Exercise Science, Murdoch University, Western Australia
*
*Address for correspondence: Dr Bethanie Gouldthorp, School of Psychology, Murdoch University, South Street, Murdoch WA 6150, Australia. tel: + 61 08 9360 2348; fax: +61 08 9360 6492; e-mail: B.Gouldthorp@murdoch.edu.au
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Abstract

Previous 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.

Keywords

narrativepoint-of-viewfamiliarityperspectiveemotionreadingengagement
Type
Research Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , March 2016 , pp. 96 - 123
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Copyright
Copyright © UK Cognitive Linguistics Association 2015 

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