The influences of narrative perspective shift and scene detail on narrative semantic processing

Abstract

The embodied view of semantic processing holds that readers achieve reading comprehension through mental simulation of the objects and events described in the narrative. However, it remains unclear whether and how the encoding of linguistic factors in narrative descriptions impacts narrative semantic processing. This study aims to explore this issue under the narrative context with and without perspective shift, which is an important and common linguistic factor in narratives. A sentence-picture verification paradigm combined with eye-tracking measures was used to explore the issue. The results showed that (1) the inter-role perspective shift made the participants’ to evenly allocate their first fixation to different elements in the scene following the new perspective; (2) the internal–external perspective shift increased the participants’ total fixation count when they read the sentence with the perspective shift; (3) the scene detail depicted in the picture did not influence the process of narrative semantic processing. These results suggest that perspective shift can disrupt the coherence of situation model and increase the cognitive load of readers during reading. Moreover, scene detail could not be constructed by readers in natural narrative reading.