What makes folk tales unique: content familiarity, causal structure, scripts, or superstructures?

Requiring readers to re-order randomly ordered sentences into a coherent text significantly enhances recall relative to that in a read-only control condition for non-folk-tale texts but not for folk tales (Einstein, McDaniel, Owen, & Coté, 1990). Experiments 1-3 showed that embedding components...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition Vol. 20; no. 1; p. 169
Main Authors McDaniel, M A, Hines, R J, Waddill, P J, Einstein, G O
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States 01.01.1994
Subjects
Cognition
Cues
Folklore
Humans
Mental Recall
Models, Psychological
Reading
Online AccessGet more information

Cover

More Information
Summary:Requiring readers to re-order randomly ordered sentences into a coherent text significantly enhances recall relative to that in a read-only control condition for non-folk-tale texts but not for folk tales (Einstein, McDaniel, Owen, & Coté, 1990). Experiments 1-3 showed that embedding components of folk tales (e.g., causal structure, conventional scripts, content related to background knowledge) in non-folk-tale texts did not render sentence unscrambling ineffective for increasing recall. In Experiments 4a-4c, a folk tale was presented either as a fairy tale or as part of a newspaper article. Significant sentence unscrambling effects (in free recall) were not obtained in either presentation format, which implies that a story superstructure (a story grammar) does not contribute to the absence of the sentence unscrambling effect. It is suggested that understanding why the sentence unscrambling effect is absent for folk tales may require considering the functional role that narrative plays in socioculturally situated cognition.
ISSN:0278-7393
DOI:10.1037/0278-7393.20.1.169