72
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
1 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      Does narrative perspective influence readers’ perspective-taking? An empirical study on free indirect discourse, psycho-narration and first-person narration

      , ,
      Glossa: a journal of general linguistics
      Ubiquity Press, Ltd.

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisher
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          It is often assumed that narrating a story from the protagonist’s perspective increases the readers’ inclination to take over this perspective. In a questionnaire study, we examined to which degree different textual modes of narration (a) increase the degree to which the reader can generally relate to the protagonist (what we will call <italic>relatedness</italic>), (b) make the reader prone to imagine the scene from the <italic>spatial point-of-view </italic>of the protagonist, and (c) enhance the psychological perspective-taking of the reader, measured as <italic>identification </italic>with the protagonist. We employed two different types of texts—one literary and one non-literary—and tested them in four different modes of narration: free indirect discourse, psycho-narration, first-person narration and external focalization. In terms of the <italic>relatedness </italic>between the reader and protagonist and <italic>spatial perspective-taking </italic>the largest differences (descriptively) occurred between external focalization and psycho-narration (<italic>p </italic>&lt; .05 for <italic>relatedness</italic>, <italic>p </italic>&lt; .05 for <italic>spatial perspective-taking</italic>) and between external focalization and first-person narration (<italic>p </italic>&lt; .05 for <italic>relatedness</italic>, for <italic>spatial perspective-taking p </italic>&lt; .1). <italic>Identification</italic>, measured with items from a questionnaire on reading experience (Appel et al. 2002), was highest for first-person narration. Here, the difference between first-person narration and external focalization turned out significant only after including dispositional empathy, thematic interest for the text and attention during reading as covariates. Results for the other two perspective-taking measures were unaffected by the inclusion of the same covariates. In conclusion, our data show that first-person and psycho-narration increased the tendency to take over the perspective of the protagonist, but FID did not. This article is part of the special collection: <a href="/collections/special/perspective-taking/">Perspective Taking</a>

          Related collections

          Author and article information

          Journal
          Glossa: a journal of general linguistics
          Glossa
          Ubiquity Press, Ltd.
          2397-1835
          January 20 2017
          June 28 2017
          : 2
          : 1
          : 61
          Article
          10.5334/gjgl.225
          e70844d2-b43f-4537-90f5-6072f69b5c4c
          © 2017
          History

          Comments

          Comment on this article

          Related Documents Log