Not all narrative shifts function equally

Readers of narratives keep track of narrative events and the information as sociated with these events. Does some of this associated information help s tructure the processing of and memory for the narrative? In three experimen ts, we examined the role of basic event building blocks (character, time, a nd location) in event indexing during text comprehension. These three exper iments dealt with perceived coherence, perceived cohesion, and on-line proc essing, respectively. The results indicated that characters are more likely to serve as event indexes. Although the findings with respect to indexing were similar in all three experiments, interesting differences emerged as a function of the level of text comprehension examined (coherence, cohesion, or on-line processing).