Biomedical subjects

David N Rapp

Publications and source records attributed to David N Rapp.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Character movement and the representation of space during narrative comprehension.

Traditional research on situation models has examined the accessibility of locations and objects during narrative experiences. These studies have described a ubiquitous gradient effect: Spatial locations and objects in reader focus are more accessible than locations farther from this focus, with accessibility decreasing as a function of distance. How might readers' expectations about character movement, beyond information about spatial locations, additionally affect this accessibility gradient? In two experiments, we investigated whether reader expectations for character movement impact the accessibility of spatial information from memory. In Experiment 1, participants read stories that described characters moving in either a unidirectional or a random pattern through a learned environment. In Experiment 2, characters moved forward in a unidirectional way or backtracked through previously explored rooms. The results suggest that reader expectations for character movement can influence the accessibility of spatial information. Such expectations play a critical role in processes of narrative comprehension.

Comprehension↗

PubMed2004

Interactive dimensions in the construction of mental representations for text.

To detail the structure and format of memory for texts, researchers have examined whether readers monitor separate text dimensions for space, time, and characters. The authors proposed that the interactivity between these individual dimensions may be as critical to the construction of complex mental models as the discrete dimensions themselves. In the present experiments, participants read stories in which characters were described as traveling from a start to a final location. During movement between locations, characters engaged in activities that could take either a long or short amount of time to complete. Results indicate that accessibility for the spatial locations was a function of the passage of time. The authors interpret this as evidence that the interactive nature of text dimensions affects the structure of representations in memory.

Cognition↗

PubMed2003

Out of sight, out of mind: occlusion and the accessibility of information in narrative comprehension.

Do readers encode the perceptual perspectives of characters during narrative comprehension? To address this question, we conducted two experiments using stories that sometimes described situations in which certain information was occluded from the protagonists' views. We generated two related hypotheses concerning the potential impact of occlusion events on text representations. One, the event boundary hypothesis, suggested that any salient narrative event would reduce the accessibility of prior story information. The second, the perceptual availability hypothesis, suggested that accessibility would decrease most for information no longer visible to story protagonists. In Experiment 1, the participants were slowest to respond to verification questions that asked about occluded information. In Experiment 2, we demonstrated that this effect did not extend to other, nonoccluded information. These results suggest that readers encode text information from the perceptual perspective of story protagonists. This is consistent with recent perceptual symbol views of language comprehension.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2002

A reason to rhyme: phonological and semantic influences on lexical access.

During on-line language production, speakers rapidly select a sequence of words to express their desired meaning. The current study examines whether this lexical selection is also dependent on the existing activation of surface properties of the words. Such surface properties clearly matter in various forms of wordplay, including poetry and musical lyrics. The experiments in this article explore whether language processing more generally is sensitive to these properties. Two experiments examined the interaction between phonological and semantic features for written and verbal productions. In Experiment 1, participants were given printed sentences with a missing word, and were asked to generate reasonable completions. The completions reflected both the semantic and the surface features of the preceding context. In Experiment 2, listeners heard sentence contexts, and were asked to rapidly produce a word to complete the utterance. These spontaneous completions again incorporated surface features activated by the context. The results suggest that lexical access in naturalistic language processing is influenced by an interaction between the surface and semantic features of language.

Auditory Perception↗

PubMed2002

Readers' reality-driven and plot-driven analyses in narrative comprehension.

We suggest that when readers experience narratives, their expectations about the likelihood of narrative events are informed by two types of analyses. Reality-driven analyses incorporate real-world constraints involving, for example, time and space; plot-driven analyses incorporate concerns about outcomes that emerge from the plot. We explored the interaction of these two types of analyses in the application of temporal situation models. Participants read stories in which the final episode occurred after a minute time shift (i.e., "A minute later...") or hour time shift (i.e., "An hour later..."). Our experiments assessed participants' judgments and reading times for statements describing the state of events (e.g., the possibility that characters could carry out particular behaviors) following each type of time shift. Experiments 1A and 1B demonstrated that readers are appropriately sensitive to the real concomitants of time shifts. Experiments 2A and 2B demonstrated, even so, that plot-driven preferences modify judgments and reading times away from reality-driven expectations. Our results have implications for the role of the reader in theories of narrative comprehension.

Adult↗