ENCODING DISCOURSE PERSPECTIVE DURING THE READING OF A LITERARY TEXT

The present studies investigated whether readers incorporate discourse perspective into their mental representations of a literary text. Subjects in Experiment 1 read and reread the literary text 'The Demon Lover' by Elizabeth Bowen. Subjects read sentences which introduced a change in perspective more slowly than sentences which did not. However, this outcome only occurred in the first reading and not in the second, indicating that perspective information was encoded from the first reading. Subjects also read suspense-eliciting sentences faster than other sentences. This finding occurred for both readings, indicating that subjects experienced suspense during both readings. In Experiment 2, subjects performed a rating task which required them to rate statements on discourse perspective. The results of both experiments indicate that readers encode discourse perspective in their mental representations. The results were discussed in the context of the situation model/deictic view of comprehension. © 1995.