The Effect Of Route-angularity On Spatial Situation Model Constructing In Text

Research on text comprehension is an important part of cognitive psychology, Situation model is considered as the higher level of text representation, so it attracts the focuses of many researchers. The spatial dimension of situation model has been explored most often. Most researchers agree that readers can build situation models of the information described by texts, and they include factors such as location of objects, spatial distance of objects and so on.Layout-learning & Anaphora resolution is an important way to explore the representation of spatial distance in text comprehension. Firstly,participants learn the layout of a building which contains several objects in different rooms, and then read narratives describing motions of the protagonist in this building. A target sentence including a definite noun phrase was used in these narratives. The definite noun phrase refers to an object in the building,and this anaphor-like phrase will cause a memory search. Researchers found that anaphora resolution depended on the spatial distance between the reader and the object. In addition, some researches argued that this process of letting participants learn the layout firstly, and then read text is different from the one of reading text directly, so it couldn't real characteristics of spatial situation models. But these two paradigms did not have the route-angularity into account, and studies have shown that the route-angularity does affect the distance estimates. According to these problems, our paper advanced some hypotheses and explored the rules of distance representation in three experiments.There were three experiments in this study. In experiment 1, we used the method of layout-learning & Anaphora resolution which was explained in the foregoing paragraph; in experiment 2, participants read narratives describing location of a small town, and in each site there was an object. By motion sentences,the participants' attentions were removed from one site to another. Reading times of the following target sentences that refer to objects in one of these site by means of a definite noun phrase can imply whether participants established a spatial representation of text or not. Separated category distance and metric distance, and the results showed that when the category distance and metric distance was all the same,the number of angularity influenced the time of anaphora resolution. It demonstrated that the more the angularity of the route, the more times it took to complete the anaphora resolution. These experiments showed that the number of angularity had independent influence on anaphora resolution. In experiment 3, using eye movement monitoring, display the text and the routes synchronous, forcing the subjects to follow the protagonist in real time, Separated category distance and metric distance and the number of angularity, the results showed that when the category distance and metric distance and the number of angularity were all the same,the Straight-line distance influenced the time of anaphora resolution.Integrated the three experiments, we can prove that route-angularity does effects on distance representation in text comprehension, when the description of location is simple, the spatial situation models which readers constructed were route-chart type, they completed anaphora resolution through reverse searching; when the description is more complex, readers prefer to construct a map-based space situation model, they will find the shortest straight line distance through the space bridge.