ABSTRACT
Since the early 1980s, there has been a considerable amount of theoretical conjecture and empirical research regarding the construction of situation models during the comprehension of narrative texts. This interest in situation models was largely influenced by the seminal book by van Dijk and Kintsch (1983). van Dijk and Kintsch argued that readers not only construct a representation for the gist of the explicit text, but also a representation for the situation described in the text. An underlying assumption of van Dijk and Kintsch’s thesis is that there is a verisimilitude between the real world and the story world. Readers presumably use their general knowledge of the real world to construct a mental model of the events depicted in the narrative world. As an example of this verisimilitude, narrative events are understood as being causally linked within a narrative time and space, much like the manner in which we understand events in the real world. Thus, the situation model provides an index of narrative events along a number of dimensions, such as characters and objects, temporality, spatiality, causality, and intentionality (Magliano, Trabasso, & Langston, 1995; Zwaan, Langston, & Graesser, 1995; Zwaan, Magliano, & Graesser, 1995).
