Four experiments investigated how the accessibility of a referent for
an anaphoric noun pharase decreases with the spatial distance of the r
eferent from the focus of attention within a situation model. In all e
xperiments, subjects first memorized the diagram of a building and obj
ects located in it, then read narratives describing characters activit
ies in that building. The narratives contained motion sentences descri
bing how the protagonist moved from room to room through the building.
Accessibility of referents was probed by undistinguished ''target'' s
entences that followed the motion sentences. Each target sentence cont
ained a definite noun phrase that referred to a memorized object in on
e of the building's rooms (''He thought that the shelves still looked
like an awful mess''). Reading times of target sentences increased wit
h the number of rooms between the object and the protagonist, suggesti
ng that accessibility of the referent decreased with spatial distance
between the referent and the focus of attention in the readers' situat
ion model. Experiment 1 showed faster access to referents when target
sentences mentioned the room in which the referent was located. Experi
ment 2 compared motion sentences that explicitly mentioned the protago
nist's movement to sentences that mentioned only the protagonist's fin
al location. Similar effects of distance from focus to referent were f
ound, suggesting that readers use situation models to infer movements
not explicitly mentioned in the text. Experiment 3 demonstrated that t
he results were not caused by unexpected or confusing discourse. Exper
iment 4 showed that the results could not be explained by temporal ord
er of studying the rooms during learning instead of spatial distance.
(C) 1995 Academic Press, Inc.