DO READERS CONSTRUCT SPATIAL REPRESENTATIONS IN NATURALISTIC STORY COMPREHENSION

This study investigated whether spatial situation models are construct ed in naturalistic story comprehension. The experiment featured a rela tively complex, naturalistic text. When college students were given a normal reading instruction, they processed spatial information relativ ely fast and were relatively poor in verifying spatial inferences, com pared to subjects given a spatial reading instruction. Additional anal yses showed that the possession of a relatively strong spatial represe ntation does not influence the processing and representation of subseq uent spatial information under a normal reading instruction. Therefore , during normal reading, readers are not very much engaged in construc ting, maintaining, and updating a spatial situation model.