TY - JOUR
T1 - Subjective Story Structure
AU - Pollard-Gott, Lucy
AU - Todres, Amy K.
AU - McCloskey, Michael
N1 - Funding Information:
•This paper is based in part on research reported at the Eastern Psychological Association meetings, 1979. This work was done while the first author held a National Science Foundation predoctoral fellowship. The research was supported by Public Health Service Research Grant MH 23401, S. Glucksberg, principal investigator, and Biomedical Research Support Grant 5S07RR07041-12, Michael McCloskey, principal investigator. We thank Sam Glucksberg and Roy Freedle for helpful comments on earlier versions. Requests for reprints should be sent to Lucy Pollard-Gott, Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544.
PY - 1979/10/1
Y1 - 1979/10/1
N2 - In the present study, the relation of story grammars to perceived story structure is investigated. A method is offered for arriving at an empirical description of perceived story structure. People are asked to sort the sentences of simple stories into groups that seem to go together naturally in the structure of the story. A pooled measure of structural relatedness among story propositions is thus derived. Hierarchical clustering procedures (Johnson, 1967) are used to generate subjective story structures for stories adapted from Mandler and Johnson (1977) and Glenn (1978), the two comparison grammars chosen for the present study. Results indicate generally good agreement between the empirical and theoretical structural descriptions. In several instances, however, the empirical structures depart in meaningful ways from the structural descriptions generated by the grammars. Major individual differences in perceived structure also arise. In a second experiment, this procedure is successfully extended to texts other than stories.
AB - In the present study, the relation of story grammars to perceived story structure is investigated. A method is offered for arriving at an empirical description of perceived story structure. People are asked to sort the sentences of simple stories into groups that seem to go together naturally in the structure of the story. A pooled measure of structural relatedness among story propositions is thus derived. Hierarchical clustering procedures (Johnson, 1967) are used to generate subjective story structures for stories adapted from Mandler and Johnson (1977) and Glenn (1978), the two comparison grammars chosen for the present study. Results indicate generally good agreement between the empirical and theoretical structural descriptions. In several instances, however, the empirical structures depart in meaningful ways from the structural descriptions generated by the grammars. Major individual differences in perceived structure also arise. In a second experiment, this procedure is successfully extended to texts other than stories.
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U2 - 10.1080/01638537909544468
DO - 10.1080/01638537909544468
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84938050536
SN - 0163-853X
VL - 2
SP - 251
EP - 281
JO - Discourse Processes
JF - Discourse Processes
IS - 4
ER -