Deictic Centers AND THE COGNITIVE STRUCTURE OF NARRATIVE COMPREHENSION

Abstract

This paper discusses the theoretical background and some of the results of an interdisciplinary, cognitive-science research project on the comprehension of narrative text. The unifying theme of our work has been the notion of a deictic center: a mental model of spatial, temporal, and character information contributed by the reader of the narrative and used by the reader in understanding the narrative. We examine the deictic center in the light of our investigations from the viewpoints of linguistics, cognitive psychology, individual differences (language pathol-ogy), literary theory of narrative, and artificial intelligence. 21. NARRATIVE AND THE PROBLEM OF COMPREHENSION. Narrative... is a ‘‘primary and irreducible form of human comprehension.’’