Does narrative perspective influence readers’ perspective-taking? An empirical study on free indirect discourse, psycho-narration and first-person narration (original) (raw)
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Many claims have been advanced about the effects of specific narrative strategies on readers' engagement with characters, but the available evidence is still limited. One question in particular stands out in the current debate. Is first-person narrative more or less conducive to empathy and trust for the protagonist than third-person, internally focalized narrative? This essay tackles this question by examining the effect of narrative perspective on readers' responses to a complex, and potentially unreliable, character. To this end, we conducted an experimental study with 76 Dutch high-school students. Contrary to our predictions, the manipulation of narrative perspective did not affect empathy for the character, but did affect trust. We suggest that the increase in trust in third-person narrative depends on the external narrator's authority, which validates the perspective of the protagonist. The essay discusses these and other findings, combining experimental research with a qualitative analysis of readers' comments on the character.
Zeitschrift Fur Sprachwissenschaft, 2023
In this paper, we present the results of an experiment investigating the effect of different narrative situations on the availability of locally prominent protagonists as anchor for Free Indirect Discourse (FID). We created items in three conditions: condition A featured a neutral third-person narrator, condition B a homodiegetic first-person narrator and condition C a prominent, evaluative third-person narrator. Participants read several short text segments all ending with FID and were asked to rate the acceptability of the FID sentence. The results revealed that condition B received significantly lower ratings than the other two conditions, whereas there was no significant difference between conditions A and C. An additional study, in which participants had to choose if the thought expressed by FID belonged to the narrator or the protagonist, showed that there was a strong tendency to choose the protagonist as perspectival center in all three conditions. The results from Exp. 1 prove that while the presence of a homodiegetic first-person narrator strongly constrains a locally prominent protagonist's availability as anchor for FID, it is not similarly affected by the presence of a globally prominent third-person narrator. This further confirms that narrative texts possess an inherent potential for multiperspectivity.
Two kinds of perspective taking in narrative texts
Semantics and Linguistic Theory, 2017
In this paper, I argue for the existence of two distinct kinds of protagonists’ perspective taking in narrative texts. The first, Free Indirect Discourse, represents conscious thoughts or utterances of protagonists and involves context shifting: All context-sensitive expressions with the exception of pronouns and tenses are interpreted with respect to the fictional context of some salient protagonist (Schlenker 2004; Sharvit 2008; Eckardt 2014, Maier 2015). The second, which I dub viewpoint shifting, does not necessarily represent conscious thoughts or utterances and it does not involve context shifting. Rather, a situation is described as it is perceived by a salient protagonist or in a way that reflects the doxastic state of such a protagonist, not with respect to the Common Ground (CG) of narrator and reader. While FID is only available at the root level, i.e. at the speech act level, viewpoint shifting is available at the level of finite matrix clauses.
The Influence of perspective and gender on the processing of narratives
2010
The overarching aim of this research was to examine potential boundary conditions to situation model construction (Experiment 1) and narrative-based persuasion (Experiment 3). Variables such as narrative perspective (i.e., 2 nd or 3 rd person) and matched characteristics with the reader (i.e., participant-protagonist gender match) were first examined using situation model updating (Experiment 1) and behavioral measures (Experiment 3) as dependent measures. It was expected that situation model updating would be more likely for narratives written in the 2 nd person perspective and with a participant-protagonist gender match. It was uncertain, however, for health promotion narratives, whether these manipulations would increase the likelihood that readers would be persuaded by a story and take informative pamphlets and coupons for samples of sunscreen. The findings of Experiment 1 did not reveal greater situation model updating for 2 nd person matched narratives. Further examination of the stimuli used in the first experiment (Experiment 2) suggested that, relative to past research, while there was greater interest in the stories, there was less imaginability (i.e., picturing oneself as the protagonist). This pattern suggests that while interest in the story content may engage readers for a 3 rd person perspective (i.e., he or she), other factors are necessary for engagement for a 2 nd person perspective (i.e., you). For example, in the latter perspective, part of the Reasoning and Memory Lab. I am also especially grateful to Nina Brathwaite,
The Protagonist's First Perspective Influences the Encoding of Spatial Information in Narratives
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2015
Three experiments examined the first-perspective alignment effect that is observed when retrieving spatial information from memory about described environments. Participants read narratives that described the viewpoint of a protagonist in fictitious environments and then pointed to the memorized locations of described objects from imagined perspectives. Results from Experiments 1 and 2 showed that performance was best when participants responded from the protagonist's first perspective even though object locations were described from a different perspective. In Experiment 3, in which participants were physically oriented with the perspective used to describe object locations, performance from that description perspective was better than that from the protagonist's first perspective, which was, in turn, better than performance from other perspectives. These findings suggest that when reading narratives, people default to using a reference frame that is aligned with their own facing direction, although physical movement may facilitate retrieval from other perspectives.
Frontiers in Communication
There is a long tradition in philosophy and literary criticism of belief in the social and moral benefits of exposure to fiction, and recent empirical work has examined some of these claims. However, little of this research has addressed the textual features responsible for the hypothesized cognitive effects. We present two experiments examining whether readers’ social and moral cognition are influenced by theperspectivefrom which a narrative is told (voice and focalization), and whether potential effects of perspective are mediated by transportation into the story or by identification with the protagonist. Both experiments employed a between-subjects design in which participants read a short story, either in the first-person voice using internal focalization, third-person voice using internal focalization, or third-person voice using external focalization. Social and moral cognition was assessed using a battery of tasks. Experiment 1 (N= 258) failed to detect any effects of perspec...
Readers’ processing of perceptual perspective and stance
Discourse Processes, 2018
We argue that to understand how readers process narrative, it is necessary to distinguish between psychological stance (i.e., how the narrator evaluates events and characters) and physical perspective (i.e., the angle of view from which events are described). Although these are metaphorically related, the cognitive processes that produce such a connection remain elusive. Here, we provide an analysis of a focal-character heuristic that allows readers to infer stance from physical perspective in third-person narrative. In particular, if readers assume that the story world is described from the physical vantage of a focal character, then that character may be assumed to represent the narrator, and therefore be a reliable source of information about the story world, including psychological evaluations of characters and events. Two experiments support this analysis. In Experiment 1, we used constructed materials. In Experiment 2, we manipulated existing literary short stories. In both experiments, attributing perceptual information to a character increased the reader's adoption of that character's stance.
Parameters of Narrative Perspectivization: The Narrator
Open Library of Humanities 6/2, 28 [Special issue ‘The Language of Perspective’, herausgegeben von Corien Bary, Leopold Hess & Kees Thijs], 1–33., 2020
Narrations have traditionally been seen as linguistic artefacts that are mediated by someone who is telling the story. As such, the narrator’s perspective constitutes a central parameter when exploring the possibilities of a unified approach to narrative perspective. With this in mind, this paper aims to take a closer look at the narrator from both theoretical and empirical viewpoints. Based on a review of the current state of the art with respect to narrative perspectivization in general, and the narrator’s perspective in particular, it leads to the conclusion that the narrator is best conceptualized as a covert viewpoint potential that can be actualized to different degrees. As such, the narrator’s perspective should not be identified with “plain narration”, but as a perspective that has to be established by linguistic cues. In a second step, this is supported by an empirical analysis of a specific narrative constellation in German which shows that the narrator’s perspective does not necessarily arise per default and examines which linguistic indicators are able to actualize the narrator’s point of view.
Point of view in narrative comprehension, memory, and production
Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1979
A preference for a consistent point of view pervades narrative comprehension, memory, and production. Subjects read statements exhibiting a consistent point of view faster than statements exhibiting a change in point of view, and they rated the consistent statements as more comprehensible than change statements. Futhermore, subjects tended to misrecall change statements as consistent statements; and when asked to edit statements to make ,them more comprehensible, they rewrote change statements to be consistent. Merely making a character the subject of the narrative statement sufficed to establish his as the dominant point of view.
Journal of Literary Theory, 2010
impression of combining direct discourse with indirect discourse« (Rimmon-Kenan 1983, 112). As opposed to direct discourse, FID does not use quotation marks, and as opposed to regular indirect discourse, FID does not use a reporting clause (»s/he said…«). Moreover, a verb that would be present tense in direct discourse becomes past tense in FID. To take an example from the literary text we used for the studies reported below, in the sentence ›I don't know‹, the young officer answered, the first clause is direct discourse, while He did not know! is FID. While the use of the third person indicates that a narrator is ›reporting‹, the thoughts and feelings that are expressed seem to originate in the character's consciousness, which is emphasized by the use of the exclamation point (cf. Rimmon-Kenan 1983, 115). Thus, linguistic markers for FID are typically the presence of third person pronouns and past tense, and the absence of a reporting verb or quotation marks.