The Study On Distance Of Spatial Situation Model In Text Reading

Research on text reading 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 researches 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.Anaphora resolution is an important way to explore the representation of spatial distance in text reading. 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. But there are two kinds of spatial distances: category distance and metric distance. The former is the number of rooms and the latter is the length of them. Most of the past studies used the number of rooms to represent distance, and didn't take the length of them into consideration. Which distance caused the spatial gradient in reading times? Several researches had been done to explore this problem, but all of them could not give a satisfactory explanation. 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 reflect the real characteristics of spatial situation models. 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. Experiment 1 included Experiment 1a and 1b. In this part, we used the method of layout-learning and text-reading which was explained in the foregoing paragraph. Experiment 1a separated category distance from metric distance, and the results showed that when the metric distance was the same, the category distance influenced the time of anaphora resolution. Experiment 1b further explored the effect of metric distance. It demonstrated that the longer the metric distance of the path room, the more times it took to complete the anaphora resolution. These two experiments showed that both category distance and metric distance had independent influence on anaphora resolution.In Experiment 2 and Experiment 3, participants read narratives describing location of several rooms, and in each room there was an object. By motion sentences, the participants' attentions were removed from one room to another. Reading times of the following target sentences that refer to objects in one of these rooms by means of a definite noun phrase can imply whether participants established a spatial representation of text or not. Experiment 2a showed that when layout in the discourse was simple, readers established a spatial situation model during reading. Experiment 2b demonstrated that when readers were confronted with complex layout, they didn't represent the spatial information. However, they could represent the surface characters of the text itself. Experiment 3 explored the representation of two kinds of metric distance: implicit metric distance and explicit metric distance. It showed that both kinds of metric distance couldn't be represented in text reading, but the category distance can be represented.