How Do Readers Deal with Flashbacks in Narratives

How Do Readers Deal with Flashbacks in Narratives? Stephanie Kelter (kelter@gp.tu-berlin.de) Institut fur Psychologie und Arbeitswissenschaft, Technical University of Berlin, Sekr. FS1, Franklinstr. 5-7 D-10587 Berlin, Germany Berry Claus (bclaus@cs.tu-berlin.de) Institut fur Psychologie und Arbeitswissenschaft, Technical University of Berlin, Sekr. FS1, Franklinstr. 5-7 D-10587 Berlin, Germany Abstract The study addresses the question of how readers mentally represent narratives containing flashbacks. Do they insert the flashback information at the chronologically appropriate location into their representation or do they encode it as background information about the situation described immediately before? To investigate the two hypotheses three experiments were conducted. Experiment 1 and 2 examine the reading times for flashback sentences during narrative processing and Experiment 3 the structure of the representations that readers construct for narratives containing flashbacks. The results support the chronological hypothesis. Keywords: text comprehension; reading; narratives; temporal information; flashbacks. Introduction An essential aspect of narrative comprehension is to mentally relate the described situations to each other in order to build an integrated representation of the narrated world. In this regard, comprehenders may consider certain dimensions of situations to be especially important. Empirical findings suggest that comprehenders pay most attention to the protagonist, to causality, and to the temporal dimension of the narrated world (e.g., Rinck & Weber, 2003; Zwaan, Magliano, & Graesser, 1995). The special importance attached to temporal information may to some extent be due to the fundamental role that the temporal dimension plays in mentally organizing states of affairs in direct experience. However, the use of the temporal dimension for organizing narrated situations may also be suggested by the structure of narratives themselves. In narratives, the various situations are typically described in chronological order, that is, in the order in which they occur in the narrated world. In order to be better able to assess the importance that comprehenders attach to temporal relations per se, it may be useful to investigate the way in which comprehenders deal with flashbacks in narratives. In a flashback, an event, process, or state is mentioned that is temporally located prior to the current narrative now point. In the following example, sentence (1b) and (1c) constitute a flashback. John’s TV-watching and falling-in- love-with-Antigua occurred prior to the narrative now point, which is established by (1a). (1a) John went to a travel agency to ask about holidays to the Caribbean. (1b) Last night he had watched a fascinating TV-report about Antigua. (1c) He had fallen in love with this island. Note that the sentences (1b) and (1c) are in past perfect. In English, the past perfect is not obligatory in flashback sentences. However, in German and many other languages, the temporal precedence has to be indicated by the tense. How do comprehenders mentally organize the situations described in narratives containing flashbacks? If they in fact attach great importance to temporal relations, then it is to be expected that they re-arrange the text information and integrate the flashback information at the chronologically appropriate location into the hitherto constructed representation. However, there are reasons to suppose that in the case of flashbacks, comprehenders may dispense with a strictly temporal organization of their representation. Discourse linguistic analyses (e.g., Asher & Lascarides, 2003; Kehler, 1999; ter Meulen, 1995) have shown that flashbacks do not appear arbitrarily in a text. Rather, a flashback is closely related to the preceding sentence, providing supplementary information concerning the cause or other aspects of the situation described in that sentence. For example, in the text given above, the mention of John having watched the TV- report elucidates what John had in mind when inquiring about holidays. Thus, a flashback serves a particular discourse function. It is to convey background information about the situation described immediately before. Accordingly, one may suppose that when encountering a flashback, comprehenders attach the information given to the situation described in the previous sentence. To date, experimental text comprehension research has barely addressed the processing of flashbacks. There are some studies showing that narratives describing events in nonchronological order are more difficult to understand than narratives in which the order of the description matches the order in which the events occur in the described world (e.g., Baker, 1978; Ohtsuka & Brewer, 1992). This match- mismatch issue was also investigated in some studies of the processing of complex sentences containing the connective before or after (e.g., Hoeks, Stowe, & Wunderlink, 2004; Mandler, 1986; Munte, Schiltz, & Kutas, 1998). However, the results of these studies are mixed. Moreover, it is unclear whether the findings from such studies allow for conclusions to be made as to the processing of flashbacks, as the relation between the two clauses of complex temporal sentences is hardly comparable to the relation between a flashback and the preceding text. In a complex temporal sentence, the function of the subordinate clause is to specify a temporal region within which the time of the situation described in the main clause is located (cf. Kamp, van