Perspective Taking in Narrative Comprehension: A Three-Factor Investigation

Date

2024-9-6

Author

Akkuşçu, Mustafa

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A narrative is a kind of discourse wherein events/situations revolving around characters are described. The field of narrative comprehension deals with how characters/events in narratives are represented in readers' cognitive system, what types of inferences are activated, and what text factors influence the comprehension of narratives. In this paper, we focus on the issue of perspective taking in narrative comprehension. Some studies argue that readers always take the protagonist's perspective while reading narratives, whereas others argue that it depends on several factors (e.g., the point-of-view the narrative is written from). To investigate this issue further, we developed several hypotheses comprising of three factors. Our main hypotheses, which follow some important studies in the literature, state that while reading passages written from third person point-of-view, readers adopt the omniscient narrator's perspective, whereas in passages written from first-person point-of-view, readers adopt the protagonist's perspective. For our specific hypotheses, we added two more factors to our formulation (i.e., establishment and deictic motion verbs). We argued that 1) establishment of source and destination information, as well as 2) deictic motion verbs (come, go) and how these verbs are used are important in deciphering perspective taking. We conducted 10 experiments with native English speakers to test the effects of our three factors (i.e., narrator point-of-view, establishment, and deictic motion verbs). We used reading time as the dependent measure in our experiments. The results overall indicated that readers consistently adopted the protagonist's perspective during reading. We discussed the results and offered some directions for future studies.

Subject Keywords

narrative comprehension, perspective taking, deictic motion verbs, establishment, narrator point-of-view

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/111432

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Graduate School of Informatics, Thesis