Perspective-driven text comprehension

SUMMARY The present article reports results of an eye-tracking experiment, which examines whether the perspective-driven text comprehension framework applies to comprehension of narrative text. Sixty-four participants were instructed to adopt either a burglar’s or an interior designer’s perspective. A pilot test showed that readers have more overlapping prior knowledge with the burglar-relevant than with the interior designer-relevant information of the experimental text. Participants read either a transparent text version where the (ir)relevance of text segments to the perspective was made apparent, or an opaque text version where no direct mention of the perspective was made. After reading participants wrote a free recall of the text. The results showed that perspective-related prior knowledge modulates the perspective effects observed in on-line text processing and that signalling of (ir)relevance helps in encoding relevant information to memory. It is concluded that the proposed framework generalizes to the on-line comprehension of narrative texts. Copyright # 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Readers often have a specific viewpoint or perspective in mind when reading. For example, you may read a historical novel from the viewpoint of a civil rights advocate or a biography of Marilyn Monroe imagining what it would have been like to be her. The present study examined the influence of a reading perspective on on-line processing and memory of narrative texts. More specifically, the present study examined whether prototypical prior knowledge related to the reading perspective and the transparency of relevance of the text information influences reading and memory of a narrative. Next, we will briefly review the previous research on perspective effects on the text comprehension. We then present a framework of perspective-driven text comprehension, which aims at describing the interplay between knowledge, attention and memory during goal-directed reading. We will then describe the present study.

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