Zacks Jeffrey M, Speer Nicole K, Reynolds Jeremy R
Department of Psychology, Washington University, Saint Louis, MO 63130, USA.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2009 May;138(2):307-27. doi: 10.1037/a0015305.
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.
在阅读故事或观看电影时，理解者会构建一系列表征以理解所描绘的事件。语篇理解理论和最近的感知事件分割理论均表明，理解者会监测诸如角色目标等情境特征，以便在活动的自然边界处更新这些表征。然而，这些理论的趋同预测此前尚未得到直接检验。两项研究提供了证据，表明诸如角色、其位置、他们与物体的互动以及他们的目标等情境特征的变化与叙事文本和电影中的事件分割有关。第三项研究表明，带有事件边界的从句比其他从句阅读速度更慢，并且情境特征的变化部分地调节了这种关系。最后一项研究表明，传入信息的可预测性会影响阅读速度，并可能影响事件分割。综合来看，这些结果表明，在理解过程中处理情境变化是一个人如何将正在进行的活动分割成事件的重要决定因素，并且这种分割与阅读过程中的处理控制有关。
