The Mental Representation of Narrative Texts as Networks: The Role of Necessity and Sufficiency in the Detection of Different Types of Causal Relations

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to determine how the perceived strength of 4 types of causal relations (physical causality, motivation, psychological causation, and enablement) is affected by causal properties (i.e., necessity and sufficiency) and by distance in the text surface structure. Participants evaluated the strength of the relations between pairs of sentences extracted from narratives either without reading the narratives, or with one or two readings of the narratives. The pairs varied in necessity and sufficiency as well as in the type of causal relation and were either adjacent or nonadjacent in the text surface structure. The criteria of necessity and sufficiency were used to identify the causal inferences connecting the statements as well as to determine their strength. As predicted, causal properties and distance in the text surface structure between the cause and its consequence systematically affected the causal strengths of the relations between text statements. Also, during reading, participants detected both adjacent and nonadjacent causal relations. A 2nd reading tends to strengthen the connections for adjacent pairs only.