Ph.D. Candidate: Mustafa Akkuşçu
Program: Cognitive Science
Date: 06.09.2024
Place: II-06

Abstract: A narrrative is a kind of discourse wherein events and situations revolving around a protagonist and other characters are described. The study of narrative comprehension deals with how characters and events in narratives are represented in readers' cognitive system, what types of inferences are activated while reading narratives, and what text factors influence the comprehension of narratives. In this paper, we focus on the issue of perspective taking in narrative comprehension. There are different views on the literature regarding whose perspective readers adopt during reading narratives. Some studies argue that readers always take the protagonist's perspective, whereas others argue that it depends on several factors (e.g., from which point of view the narrative is written). To investigate this issue further, we developed several hypotheses comprising of three factors. Our main hypotheses, which follow some important studies in the literature, state that while reading passages written from third-person point-of-view, readers adopt the omniscient narrator's perspective, whereas in passages written from first-person point-of-view, readers adopt the protagonist's perspective. For our specific hypotheses, we added two more factors to our formulation (i.e., establishment and deictic motion verbs). We conducted several experiments with native speakers of English to test the effects of these three factors. We used reading time as the dependent measure in our experiments. We discussed the results and offered some directions for future studies.