Spatial Inferences in Narrative Comprehension: the Role of Verbal and Spatial Working Memory

Abstract

During the comprehension of narrative texts, readers keep a mental representation of the location of protagonists and objects; a breach in spatial coherence is detected by longer online reading times (consistency effect). We addressed whether these spatial inferences involve verbal or spatial working memory in two experiments, combining the consistency paradigm with selective verbal and spatial working memory concurrent tasks. The first experiment found longer reading times with a concurrent spatial task under imagery instructions (t33 = 2.87, p =.021). The second experiment, under comprehension reading instructions, found effects of verbal interference on reading times and accuracy. With a verbal secondary task, reading times for the target sentence were shorter (t45 = 3.60, p =.004) and the error rate was significantly higher (t47 = 2.95, p =.005) than without interference. This pattern of results suggests that spatial inferences in narrative comprehension rely mainly on verbal resources, and spatial working memory resources are recruited when imagery is required.