Segmentation in reading and film comprehension.

Full Abstract

When reading a story or watching a film, comprehenders construct a series of representations in order to understand the events depicted. Discourse comprehension theories and a recent theory of perceptual event segmentation both suggest that comprehenders monitor situational features such as characters' goals, to update these representations at natural boundaries in activity. However, the converging predictions of these theories had previously not been tested directly. Two studies provided evidence that changes in situational features such as characters, their locations, their interactions with objects, and their goals are related to the segmentation of events in both narrative texts and films. A 3rd study indicated that clauses with event boundaries are read more slowly than are other clauses and that changes in situational features partially mediate this relation. A final study suggested that the predictability of incoming information influences reading rate and possibly event segmentation. Taken together, these results suggest that processing situational changes during comprehension is an important determinant of how one segments ongoing activity into events and that this segmentation is related to the control of processing during reading. (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved.

Author information

Author/s: Zacks, Jeffrey M (JM); Speer, Nicole K (NK); Reynolds, Jeremy R (JR);

Affiliation: Department of Psychology, Washington University, Saint Louis, MO 63130, USA. jzacks(-atsign-)artsci.wustl.edu

Grants: R01-MH70674 (Agency:NIMH NIH HHS)

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't; Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

Journal: Journal of experimental psychology. General (J Exp Psychol Gen), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2009-May; vol 138 (issue 2) : pp 307-27

Dates: Created 2009/04/28; Completed 2009/06/26;

PMID: 19397386, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 6/26/2009, IMS Date: 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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