Processing real-world violations embedded within a fantasy-world narrative.
Fantasy-text is a genre in which events routinely violate rules we know to be true in the real world. In four experiments, we explored the inherent contradiction between unrealistic fictional events and general world knowledge (GWK) to examine these competing information sources within the context of an extended fantasy-narrative. Experiments 1a and 1b demonstrated that fantasy-unrelated inconsistencies caused disruption to comprehension despite an abundance of contextual support for real-world impossible events that violate GWK. Experiment 2a demonstrated that fantasy-related inconsistencies caused disruption when they occurred at the local level and the fantasy-context stood in direct opposition to the target sentence. However, Experiment 2b demonstrated that disruption can be initially eliminated when readers encountered fantasy-related violations at the global level, but delayed-processing difficulty occurred on the spillover sentence, downstream of the target sentence. All four experiments are discussed within the context of the RI-Val model.
['Walsh|Erinn K|EK|', 'Cook|Anne E|AE|', "O'Brien|Edward J|EJ|"]
D000293:Adolescent D000704:Analysis of Variance D032882:Comprehension D003210:Concept Formation D005201:Fantasy D005260:Female D006801:Humans D008297:Male D033262:Narration D011597:Psychomotor Performance D011930:Reaction Time D011932:Reading D013997:Time Factors D055815:Young Adult
RI-Val model Fantasy narrative validation