Dynamic Mental Representations In A Described Sequence Of Events

This study explored the dynamic representation that readers construct when advancing through a described sequence of events. The materials were narrative discourses and the indexes were the time on reading critical sentence. Experiment 1 explored the construction of dynamic mental representation in short-term memory and experiment 2 did it in long-term memory. There were two sub-experiments contained in experiment 1, their focuses were on sequence of events with casual relations and without casual relations respectively.The results indicated: (1)Readers can construct dynamic mental representation for the narratived sequence of events without casual relations when the discourse was coherent, but cannot when the discourse was not coherent.(2)Casual relations can enhance the link among events, readers can construct dynamic representations for events with casual relations when the discourse were both coherent and were not. (3)Dynamic mental representation cannot be constructed in long-term memory, mental representations in long-term memory were static.