Reading a discourse often leads to the construction of a situation model – a mental representation of the state of affairs described by the text. Situation model construction is associated with specific behavioral and neural markers. In this chapter, we consider the following questions: How does reading that involves constructing a situation model differ from other kinds of reading? Do the behavioral and neurophysiological data support a distinction between incremental updating of situation model components and global updating by abandoning an old situation model to form a new one? Do situation models represent information about sensory and motor features in analog representational formats during normal reading for comprehension? The available results indicate that specific mechanisms underlie different forms of situation model updating, that situation model-based reading is qualitatively different from reading without forming situation models, and that readers routinely deploy perceptual and motor representations to understand features of the situations described by a narrative.

Reading is a cognitive tour de force. Just guiding the eyes to focus on the right part of the text at the right time is exquisitely complex (Rayner, Raney, & Pollatsek, 1995). Readers do this effortlessly, and also recognize complex patterns to identify letters, words, and larger units of text, parse strings of words into sentences, and recognize the meanings of words and sentences. However, to us the most striking thing about what happens when people read narrative texts is that they seem to transmute black marks on paper into vivid representations of hypothetical worlds – flashing armor and clinking swords or storming skies over sinking ships (Graesser, Golding, & Long, 1991). How does a reader accomplish such a feat? In this chapter, we focus on two more specific questions about the representations that readers construct when comprehending narratives: “How does a reader build up a representation of meaningful events from a linear string of words?” and “How are perceptual and motor features of experience captured in the representations the reader constructs?” Our account builds on a larger body of research on the construction of situation models in language comprehension. We will start with a brief introduction to situation models. (For a more extended review, see Radvansky and Zacks (2014).)

People ordinarily use language in complex, continuously occurring contexts. These contexts include rich and varied sources of information that can combine and exert shared influence. A common example is face-to-face conversation. When two people talk in person, there is not only spoken auditory information, but also visual information from facial and manual movements, as well as from the surrounding environment in which the conversation takes place. There may also be endogenous signals that a person experiences in context, such as memories relating prior conversations with a given speaker. In short, it is typical that a person mediates multiple multifaceted information sources when using language. By contrast, fMRI studies of the neurobiology of language often use conditions that present only features of language in isolation. In large part, this is because researchers need rigorous, reliable experimental protocols that minimize potential sources of variance (“noise”) not directly relating a feature of interest. But such traditional protocols also often minimize, if not eliminate, the way people actually know and use language in their naturalistic, “everyday” experience. Thus, a fundamental challenge for researchers studying the neurobiology of language is to understand brain function as it might occur in typical experience. In this chapter, we highlight some available approaches that can address this challenge using fMRI. With specific examples, we discuss the importance of context and ways to incorporate it in understanding brain function when people process language under more naturalistic conditions.

A neurocognitive poetics model of literary reading is presented in the light of experimental data and ideas from neuroscience, rhetoric, poetics, and aesthetics which should facilitate a more realistic and natural approach towards a special use of language, i.e. the reading of fiction and poetry.