Processing and Representing Temporal Information in Narrative Text

According to current theories in discourse research, readers monitor a series of 5 situational dimensions during narrative comprehension (Zwaan, Langston, & Graesser, 1995; Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998). These dimensions are time (e.g., the order of events), space (e.g., locations), protagonist (e.g., main character actions), causality (e.g., how one event influences another event), and intentionality (e.g., goals). These experiments were designed to further explore how readers process and represent time (duration) in situation-model construction. In 3 experiments, we examined how duration-related inconsistencies influenced processing time and processing strategies. Results indicate that readers routinely monitor the duration of events and detect temporal inconsistencies even when temporal information is implicitly presented. This provides evidence for the representation of duration information in situation models.