Representation of complex goal structures in narrative comprehension

This study inspected people's sensitivity to complex narrative goal structu res. The stories described 2 characters' attempts to accomplish independent subgoals to achieve a joint main goal. In most conditions, the success of the first subgoal was manipulated. The next subgoal always succeeded, and a subsequent target region described the second character attempting to exec ute the main goal. The target region made no reference to the text ideas of the first subgoal, and it was causally coherent with the second subgoal. T arget reading time was greater in the succeed condition than the fail condi tion (all experiments); and, in the target region, the time needed to recog nize a word representing the manipulated subgoal was shorter in the succeed condition (Experiment 3). The results suggest that readers consolidated go al information at the target region in the succeed condition, which entaile d the reinstatement of the first subgoal to working memory. The results, co upled with the absence of surface and semantic overlap between the target r egion and the Subgoal 1 section of the stories, is proposed to favor the co nstructionist analysis of text comprehension over a strong version of the m emory-based analysis.