SPATIAL SITUATION MODELS AND TEXT COMPREHENSION

Three experiments examined how readers inferred spatial information th at was relevant to a story character's movements through a previously memorized layout of a fictional building relative to various tasks. Th is study also examined how inference measures were related to spatial imagery and reading comprehension ability. Replicating the spatial sep aration effect reported by Morrow, Greenspan, and Bower (1987), probed objects were responded to faster when they were located in the same r oom of a building as the main character of a narrative than when the o bjects were located in different rooms. Experiment 2 ruled out a simpl e name-based priming explanation of the spatial separation effect, and Experiment 3 demonstrated a facilitation for objects from the charact er's target room even when readers were provided with a spatially inde terminate list description of the building. The construction-integrati on model of text comprehension accounted for the spatial separation ef fect in terms of variations in the knowledge-integration process. It w as concluded that the integration of an enriched knowledge network can facilitate the process of mapping text information onto a developing mental representation of a discourse situation, a process that gains f urther support from spatial imagery and reading comprehension ability.