| Narratives have the ability to impact a person's sense of reality by transporting them into a narrative world. However, the linguistic feature of these narratives has been overlooked. Four experiments aimed to investigate which linguistic features may influence these feelings of being transported in text and in film. In the experiments participants read or watched narratives while their reading time, eye behavior, and conscious responses to whether they were feeling transported were recorded. The responses from the first experiment were used to create a formula for scoring narrative on transportability which was subsequently used to predict transportation levels in new text. Results showed that the formula was effective for predicting transportation in text, but not for film. In addition, results for measures of pupil diameter, fixation duration, reading time, and online response while reading/viewing were also found to predict transportation to varying degrees. In addition, pupil diameter, fixation duration, and online responses predicted transportation across text and film. The four experiments show that transportation is a construct and that it can be measured using computational methods and online measures. |
