Taking Perspective: Personal Pronouns Affect Experiential Aspects of Literary Reading

Personal pronouns have been shown to influence cognitive perspective taking during comprehension. Studies using single sentences found that 3(rd) person pronouns facilitate the construction of a mental model from an observer’s perspective, whereas 2(nd) person pronouns support an actor’s perspective. The direction of the effect for 1(st) person pronouns seems to depend on the situational context. In the present study, we investigated how personal pronouns influence discourse comprehension when people read fiction stories and if this has consequences for affective components like emotion during reading or appreciation of the story. We wanted to find out if personal pronouns affect immersion and arousal, as well as appreciation of fiction. In a natural reading paradigm, we measured electrodermal activity and story immersion, while participants read literary stories with 1(st) and 3(rd) person pronouns referring to the protagonist. In addition, participants rated and ranked the stories for appreciation. Our results show that stories with 1(st) person pronouns lead to higher immersion. Two factors—transportation into the story world and mental imagery during reading—in particular showed higher scores for 1(st) person as compared to 3(rd) person pronoun stories. In contrast, arousal as measured by electrodermal activity seemed tentatively higher for 3(rd) person pronoun stories. The two measures of appreciation were not affected by the pronoun manipulation. Our findings underscore the importance of perspective for language processing, and additionally show which aspects of the narrative experience are influenced by a change in perspective.