DEMONSTRATIONS FROM WHICH THE USE OF STORY STRUCTURE MAY BE INFERRED

Constructivist premises support a principle affirming that the cognitive classification which a person imposes on materials at the time of input will limit the ways in which the material can be used when it is retrieved during memory processes. Furthermore, when persons use their

own input categories during learning, recall may proceed effortlessly and effectively. Additionally, the ways in which a person organizes input during initial exposure affects the ease with which that information will later become available (Posner, 1973, p. 33).

Numerous illustrative reports (for example, Bower, Clark, Lesgold, & Winzenz, 1969) contain evidence that lists of words are better recalled when the words name objects which a participant can categorize into personally meaningful classes. By accepting a correlative premise, an

investigator would expect that a comprehender would show relatively efficient retrieval if he can process a text using his complete, well- ordered, internally represented story structure.

One can now make the incontrovertible claim that participants better retrieve those stories built to include semantic material representing all the properly sequenced story grammar parts of a text (Stein & Glenn, 1979; Thorndyke, 1977). Further, a listener or a reader who encounters a story from which a salient story part has been omitted, on recalling the story, will fill in the missing element with text which preserves the canonical story structure (Mandler & Johnson, 1977; Stein & Glenn, 1979).

To construct another cogent demonstration that persons treat a story in terms of its grammatical structure one can start with the assumption that the organizing process takes time. The reader, using the episode schema, performs particularly important encoding operations at the boundaries of episodes. One can show, then, that “holding other factors constant, the process in load is greater at or around the episode boundaries than at other points in the episodes” (Haberlandt, Berian, & Sandson, 1980, p. 636). Reading speed decelerates at each transition to a new episode as the person’s system engages in the macrolevel operations required to shift his or her cognitive guides.

Mandler and Goodman (1982) designed a study of reading times at episode transitions in order to assure that the results would not be attributable to factors other than the load on processing produced by the important encoding operations which occur at the transitions. They used two-episode stories, carefully controlling length of sentences, number of nouns and pronouns in sentences, and so forth. They asked subjects to read the stories, which contained two sentences to represent each grammatical unit. They report the finding, among other results, that comprehenders use more time to process the first sentence than they use to process the second sentence of each story grammar unit. For example, a reader might encounter two sentences of text that serve as the ending unit of an episode, such as: “They made an awful muddy mess in the elephant yard – The zookeeper worked for two days cleaning it up” (Mandler, 1984, p. 39). On average, participants read the second of these ending unit sentences in 105 fewer milliseconds than they had used to read the first.

From their results Mandler and Goodman concluded that readers’ knowledge of story structure allows them to recognize a shift in topic as they process the first sentence of new constituents of a narrative. Comprehenders can recognize episode shifts by relying on information

such as transitional formalisms and changes in type of information. More importantly, Mandler and Johnson conclude, the reader carries his or her knowledge structure into the cognitive task, and, as a result, a comprehender does not require the presence of such narratory devices to process the content of the tale and to locate the episodic boundaries.

In short, one could set out the postulate that a person’s acquired system of narrative grammar directs his or her text processing toward anticipating the flow of the story constituents, just as one’s sentence syntax structures leads him or her to expect a predicate to follow the subject of a sentence, and so forth. Stein and Glenn (1979) extended the validity of this postulate by careful study of people’s implicit knowledge of relationships within and between narrative grammar categories. They note that state or activity statements occur within setting segments – “Once there was a little golden-haired girl known as Goldbraids.” The episode system which follows the setting consists of an entire behavior sequence (including external and internal events that affect one of the story’s characters), the character’s goal settings and expectation, the overt actions that conform to his or her internal responses, and the consequences of the character’s undertaking. Stein and Glenn stress the explicit and implied causal linkages that a comprehender can cognize in an episode. The external or internal initiating events of an episode – “One afternoon Goldbraids saw a bird hopping as if it couldn’t fly” – may

cause an internal response in a protagonist. The initiate relation designates

a direct causal connection between the initiating event and the response constituent of the story. The protagonist may experience an emotion, or become motivated to draw up a plan, or to set a goal – “Goldbraids felt very sorry for the bird.” Setting the goal causes an action, which then becomes the cause of a successful or an unsuccessful outcome – “Goldbraids knew that Daddy could help the bird. She ran to catch it, but it hopped very fast. Then suddenly it jumped up and flew away.” Unlike Mandler (1984), Stein and Glenn include a grammar category which is used at the end of a complete episode. A final reaction category would describe the affective state which the characters experience as a result of the goal attainment (or nonattainment) described in the story – “Goldbraids was annoyed that the bird had fooled her.”

To add further clarification to their propositions Stein and Glenn proceeded from the established conclusion “that story memory was a direct function of the match between text structure of stories (as presented to participants) and an ideal story structure as defined in (their) grammar system” (Stein & Nezworski, 1978, p. 190). They presented four

different stories to their participating children. They arranged the stories so that three of the four original story versions contained statements which had been presented in inverted order, relative to their theoretical formal structure. In one story, for example, the initiating event occurred after the character’s major goals had been specified, rather than immediately after the major setting statement.

The children first orally retold the stories they had heard. Second, the experimenters asked each child to tell the first, the second, and the third most important parts of the story to be remembered. To collect a third type of data Stein and Glenn asked the children direct “why” questions – “Why did Goldbraids become annoyed?”

Stein and Glenn found that the children recalled the stories in the order dictated by the grammar. Only 7 percent of the recalled statements represented deviations from the ordering of categories as prescribed by the formal theory. Seventy-five percent of the “correcting” reversals which the children had made could be predicted by diagramming the stories into the formal structure. For example, almost all of the category- ordering “errors” occurred when participants “incorrectly” rearranged into “correct” grammatical order the story in which the initiating event occurred after the goal specification. A child might thus “correctly” reposition two sentences which had originally been presented as, “Goldbraids was annoyed. She had wanted to help by taking the bird to her daddy.”

By adding new categories, that is, categories which had not been included in the originally presented stories, Stein and Glenn’s participants provided additional information about the narrative structure which children bring to a story-processing task. One of the stories presented to children, for example, contained no initiating event at the beginning of the first episode. Thirty-three percent of the first-grade children and 75 percent of the fifth-grade children added information that could be taken as the cause of the actor’s plan. In general, children added many statements which would belong to the internal response category. Additionally, 18 percent of the added statements could be classed in the consequence category.

Stein and Glenn’s analysis of data from children’s judgments of the importance of story parts provided a different kind of index of the ways in which the youngsters had processed the stories. The investigators sorted the statements which the children had judged to be the most important parts of stories to be remembered, and they isolated those recalled statements which accurately reflected story parts which the

children had heard. By this method they showed that the children had judged the statements which fit into the direct consequence category to be important. Additionally, the children, particularly the fifth-grade children, had judged as very important the character’s internal responses, such as, “Goldbraids felt sorry for the bird.”

One must carefully track through the results of Stein and Glenn’s efforts to induce the children to report a recognition of the causal relationships between episodes and between categories within an episode. A child’s response to a question about the causal links in stories was considered to be an error only if the response clearly contradicted the original story. Children made few errors in recalling the causal linkages presented in the stories. The children clearly reported one or another kind of satisfactory causal link between episodes, whether the episodes were embedded or whether they were sequential. That is, the children tended to report a causal linkage rather than a temporal linkage between episodes in the stories. Yet the children did not report the causal linkages between the constituents of the episodes as they had appeared in the original stories. Instead, they very frequently attributed the cause of internal responses, attempts, and consequences to internal responses. In short, the children appear to infer the actor’s internal reaction from hearing the initiating event, and they then attributed the character’s other internal responses, attempts, and the consequences of the attempts to those inferred internal responses.

The studies reviewed above exemplify the large and growing literature (see also, Graybeal, 1981; Mandler & DeForest, 1979; Whaley, 1981) which evidences the general proposition that persons fit textual input into a narrative grammar whose basic categories can be explicated. Furthermore, one can readily observe that children as young as age four implicitly use narrative grammar (Brown & Hurtig, 1983).

AN EXPLICATION OF THE DEVELOPMENT