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Towards a cognitive science of literary style: Perspective-taking in processing omniscient versus objective voice

Towards a Cognitive Science of Literary Style: Perspective-Taking in Processing Omniscient versus Objective Voice Manami Sato (msato@hiroshima-u.ac.jp) Hiromu Sakai (hsakai@hiroshima-u.ac.jp) Graduate School of Education, Hiroshima University 1-1-1 Kagamiyama, Higashi-Hiroshima City, Japan 739-8524 Jennifer Wu (jjw012@ucsd.edu) Benjamin K. Bergen (bkbergen@cogsci.ucsd.edu) Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego 9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, CA 92093-0515 story-tellers, from marketing directors to kindergarteners to shamans. The outstanding question for cognitive science is how we go about understanding narratives, with all their stylistic peculiarities. What cognitive operations do we perform to go from a story to understanding? Abstract What are the consequences of narrative style for the cognitive operations that comprehenders perform? Third person narratives can adopt different voices. Omniscient voice has access to the mental states of characters, while objective voice only describes how characters would appear to an observer. It’s currently unknown what cognitive consequences different voices have for people processing third person language. We hypothesize that in building representations of described scenes, omniscient voice may make comprehenders more likely to adopt the internal perspectives of characters than objective voice. We tested this prediction in a narrative-image matching study. Participants read short passages describing a third person character in either omniscient or objective voice. They then saw an image that either depicted the described scene or not, and which depicted the event from the perspective of the character or not. Their task was to decide as quickly as possible whether the image matched the narrative. In cases where the narrative and image matched, participants were significantly faster to indicate the correct decision when the narrative voice and the image perspective matched—that is, an image from the character’s perspective after an omniscient narration or an image from a different perspective after an objective narration. This finding provides the first evidence that narrative voice affects the perspective from which comprehenders represent described scenes. Narrative Voice A key feature of every narrative is that it is told using a particular (though possibly variable) narrative voice. Here, by way of illustration, is an example of two different narrative voices that appear in the same text. Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea features an eponymous old man. Throughout the narrative, we read different kinds of descriptions of him. Early on, we read: The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert. Compare this with a passage that follows, as we’re getting to know the old man a little better: Keywords: language processing; perspective; narrative voice; literary style; grammatical person; mental simulation He was asleep in a short time and he dreamed of Africa when he was a boy and the long golden beaches and the white beaches, so white they hurt your eyes, and the high capes and the great brown mountains. He lived along that coast now every night and in his dreams he heard the surf roar and saw the native boats come riding through it. He smelled the tar and oakum of the deck as he slept and he smelled the smell of Africa that the land breeze brought at morning. Introduction Understanding the processes that underlie language comprehension is among the primary concerns of cognitive science, and justifiably so. Language is pervasively, and uniquely, human. The study of the cognitive processes underlying language comprehension has, also justifiably, begun by focusing on how people process words or sentences in isolation. Yet this is not language’s natural state in the wild. We mostly interact with words and sentences embedded in context—social, physical, and linguistic. And one—though not the only—context in which words and sentences appear is in narrative. Across cultures, humans recount and process accounts of sequences of events, whether purportedly fictive or factive. We’re all Although these two passages both describe the old man in the third person, they differ in terms of their narrative voice. While the first describes properties of the old man that can be viewed by an outside observer, the second omnisciently enters the old man’s mind, so that the narrator is able to