ABSTRACT

Three experiments investigated how readers manage their mental representations during narrative comprehension. The first experiment investigated whether readers' access to their mental representations of the main character in a narrative becomes enhanced when the character is rementioned. The purpose of the second experiment was to ensure that there was nothing unusually salient about the accessibility of names. A third experiment compared more-skilled and less-skilled readers' abilities to manage the mental representations during narrative comprehension. Enhancement and suppression contribute to building mental representations by modulating the activation of concepts; enhancement increases the activation of relevant concepts, and suppression decreases the activation of concepts deemed less relevant. Results from all three experiments provide evidence that mental access to the main character is strengthened when that character is rementioned, and interfered with when a new character is introduced. The experiments illustrate that readers must keep track of who is doing what to whom to successfully read and comprehend a narrative.