ABSTRACT
It is widely accepted in discourse psychology that readers construct situation models (mental models) as they attempt to comprehend text (Graesser, Millis, & Zwaan, 1997; Kintsch, 1998; Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998). When the text is in the narrative genre, such as a simple story, the situation model is a mental microworld of events and actions, with characters performing actions in the pursuit of goals, events that present obstacles to the goals, conflicts between characters, methods of resolving conflicts, and emotional reactions to the events and conflicts. If the reader has sufficient time and motivation, the mental microworld can have quite vivid elaborations that flesh out details of the spatial setting, the style and procedure of actions, and the properties of objects that characters use. There may also be content that refers to mental states of characters (what they believe, know, perceive, and want). Mental models are created from information in the text as well as knowledge of the reader.
