Activation of Themes During Narrative Reading

Abstract

The theme of a narrative text is its main point or moral that is often implied between lines. A rapid serial visual presentation procedure (RSVP) was used to examine the online status of generation of thematic inference during narrative text comprehension. In Experiment 1, the target words were presented in different contexts with different time courses. The results showed that the facilitative effects of inferential contexts were significant for target words at the RSVP rate of 400 ms and stimulus onset asynchrony of 600 ms. There were no facilitative effects below this threshold. In Experiment 2, the location of target words was manipulated while maintaining the same presentation times. Further observed were facilitative effects of inferential contexts on target words appearing at the end of all the texts and at the middle of the texts when the reader had the correct expectation of the outcome in a text. These results suggested that thematic inference is normally generated online during comprehension. These findings indicate that the global theme of a narrative text is a fundamental component of text representation in reading. The result provides support for the constructionist theory of inference generation and the importance of theme information in constructing a coherent text representation.