The impact of illustrations on construction of situation models during narrative comprehension

Abstract

When reading narrative stories, readers monitor discontinuity of characters, space, time, goals, and causality of events and update their situation models. This study examined how illustrations of narratives influence readers’ ability to monitor story events using a verb-clustering task in which readers were asked to group verbs from a narrative into related pairings. Results showed that readers who read a text-only narrative paired verbs that were continuous in both the character and time dimensions. In contrast, readers who read a narrative with illustrations paired verbs that were continuous not only in the character and time dimensions but also in the causality dimension. These findings suggest that illustrations of narratives function to enrich the contents of situation models. Furthermore, an additional experiment showed that positioning of illustrations within the text impacted the situation model construction. Therefore, the utility of illustrations for promoting the construction of situation models and efficient comprehension of a narrative story are discussed.