ABSTRACT
People construct at least two types of narrative representations of the experiences they encounter in daily life. On one hand, they spontaneously form episode models in the course of comprehending specific events they personally experience, observe, or read about. In addition, they may intentionally form generalized representations of events in the pursuit of a more specific objective that requires them. These latter representations can sometimes be abstract codings of events that that occur frequently in certain types of situations and, therefore, constitute event prototypes (Colcombe & Wyer, 2002) or schemata (Graesser & Nakamura, 1982). They can also be linguistically coded descriptions of a specific experience that people form in the course of communicating about the experience to others.
