Readers of narratives take the protagonist's geographical perspective. Evidence from an event-related potential study

Abstract

This ERP study explores how the reader's brain is sensitive to the protagonist's perspective in the fictitious environment of narratives. Participants initially received narratives describing a protagonist living in a given geographical place. Later on they were given short paragraphs describing another character as "coming" or "going" to a place either close to or distant from the protagonist. Paragraphs referring to distant places elicited larger negative waves than those with places close to the protagonist. Moreover, narratives with the verb to come incoherent with the protagonist's perspective (e.g., "she came to the distant place") elicited larger negative-going waves in the 320-400ms time window than coherent paragraphs (e.g., "she came to the close place"). These results indicate that readers of narratives were able to take the protagonist's geographical perspective, showing discourse-level coherence effects when they read motion sentences with the marked deictic verb to come.

Keywords: Deictic verbs; Discourse coherence; Event-related potentials; Geographical perspective; N400; Reading comprehension.