Understanding Text and Stories • 311You might conclude, from the fact that the headache sentence directly follows the
shower sentence, that the shower had something to do with eliminating Sharon’s head-
ache. However, the causal connection between the shower and the headache is weaker
than the connection between the aspirin and the headache in the fi rst pair of sentences.
Making the shower–headache connection requires more work from the reader. You
might infer that the shower relaxed Sharon, or perhaps her habit of singing in the
shower was therapeutic. Or you might decide there actually isn’t much connection
between the two sentences.
Inferences create connections that are essential for creating coherence in texts,
and making these inferences can involve creativity by the reader. Thus, reading a text
involves more than just understanding words or sentences. It is a dynamic process that
involves transformation of the words, sentences, and sequences of sentences into a
meaningful story. Sometimes this is easy, sometimes harder, depending on the skill and
intention of both the reader and the writer (Goldman et al., 1999; Graesser et al., 1994;
van den Broek, 1994).
We have been describing the process of text comprehension so far in terms of how
people bring their knowledge to bear to infer connections between different parts of a
story. Another approach to understanding how people understand stories is to consider
the nature of the mental representation that people form as they read a story. This is
called the situation model approach to text comprehension.SITUATION MODELS
A situation model is a mental representation of what a text is about (Johnson-Laird,
1983). This approach proposes that the mental representation people form as they
read a story does not consist of information about phrases, sentences, or paragraphs;
instead, it is a representation of the situation in terms of the people, objects, locations,
and events that are being described in the
story (Barsalou, 2008, 2009; Graesser &
Wiemer-Hastings, 1999; Zwaan, 1999).Mental Representations as Simula tions
What exactly is the “mental representation
of what the text is about”? One way this
question has been answered is to suggest
that a person simulates the perceptual and
motor (movement) characteristics of the
objects and actions in a story. This idea has
been tested by having participants read a
sentence that describes a situation involv-
ing an object and then indicate as quickly
as possible whether or not a picture shows
the object mentioned in the sentence.
For example, consider the following two
sentences.- He hammered the nail into the wall.
- He hammered the nail into the floor.
In ● Figure 11.10a, the horizontal nail
matches the orientation that would be
expected for sentence 1, and the vertical
nail matches the orientation for sentence 2.
Robert Stanfi eld and Rolf Zwaan (2001)
presented these sentences, followed by
either a matching picture or a nonmatch-
ing picture. Because the pictures both show
nails and the task was to indicate whether(a)(1) “He hammered the nail into the wall.”(2) ”He hammered the nail into the floor.”(3) “The ranger saw the eagle in the sky.”(4) ”The ranger saw the eagle in its nest.”(b)●FIGURE 11.10 Stimuli similar to those used in (a) Stanfi eld and Zwaan’s
(2001) “orientation” experiment, and (b) Zwaan et al.’s (2002) “shape” experiment.
Participants heard sentences and were then asked to indicate whether the
picture was the object mentioned in the sentence.
Copyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.