314 • CHAPTER 11 Language
This correspondence between brain activity caused by performing actions and
by reading action words has also been studied for reading stories. Nicole Speer and
coworkers (2009) had participants read a selection from the book One Boy’s Day
(Barker & Wright, 1951), which describes the everyday activities of Raymond, a 7-year-
old boy. The participants’ brain activity was measured as they read the story.
Speer analyzed the story to determine where changes in various aspects of the story
occurred. For example, a spatial change occurred when Raymond moved from one loca-
tion to another. An object change occurred when Raymond interacted with a new object.
Thus, the sentence “He picked up his English workbook and returned to his desk” starts
with an object change and ends with a spatial change. Speer also identifi ed character
changes (when a different character is mentioned), goal changes (when a character starts
an action to achieve a new goal), and time (words like immediately or slowly).
● Figure 11.14 shows the results of this experiment. Colors indicate the area of the
brain activated by each type of change. Two things are clear: (1) reading a story acti-
vates many areas in the cortex; and (2) specifi c actions cause activity in different areas,
although there is also overlap. This correlation between events in the story and activity
in the brain supports the central proposal of the situation model approach—that read-
ing creates representations of the situations described in a story.
The overall conclusion from research on how people comprehend stories is that
understanding a text or story is a creative and dynamic process. Understanding sto-
ries involves understanding sentences by determining how words are organized into
phrases; then determining the relationships between sentences, often using inference to
link sentences in one part of a story to sentences in another part; and fi nally, creating
mental representations or simulations that involve both perceptual and motor proper-
ties of objects and events in the story. As we will now see, a creative and dynamic pro-
cess also occurs when two or more people are having a conversation.Producing Language: Conversations
Although language can be produced by a single person talking alone, as when a person
recites a monologue or gives a speech, the most common form of language produc-
tion is conversation—two or more people talking with one another. Conversation, or
dialogue, provides another example of a cognitive skill that seems easy but contains
underlying complexities.
In a conversation, other people are involved, so each person needs to take into
account what other people are saying (Pickering & Garrod, 2004). This is an impressive
accomplishment because we often don’t know what other people are going to say.●FIGURE 11.14 Speer et al. (2009) result. Colors indicate areas of the brain activated by
diff erent types of changes in stories. (Source: N. K. Speer, J. R. Reynolds, K. M. Swallow, & J. M. Zacks,
“Reading Stories Activates Neural Representations of Visual and Motor Experiences,” Psychological Science, 20,
989–999, © 2009. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications.)Character
Goal
ObjectSpace
Time
MultipleCopyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.