L'interaction narration * description dans le récit. I. Etude de la mémorisation de différents types de séquences descriptives
Guy Denhière, Denis Legros · L’Année psychologique · 1987
Summary : The interaction between narration and description in narratives : I. Recall of different kinds of descriptive statements. The main goal of this experiment was to study the interaction between description and narration in story processing by analyzing reading and free recall of descriptive sequences embedded in the narrative macrostructure of two narratives. Three different descriptive statements were associated with each narrative slatement : two state descriptions, one of them contri-buting to the cohesion of the story, the other having only an ornemental role ; and one action description. 60 Ss participated in this experiment. Reading time and free recall (immediate and delayed : 8 days) were used as indicators of input and output processes implied by the task. The analysis of reading lime showed two significant factors : important statements are read longer than unimportant statements whatever their nature (narrative or descriptive) ; and the narrative statements are read longer than the descriptive ones. Immediate and delayed free recalls varied according to the relative importance (important > non important) and the nature of the statements (narrative > action description > cohesive state description > ornemental state description). These results support the hypothesis that descriptive information processing implies some kind of re-processing of the related narrative information and that memorization of this descriptive information varies according to both the importance of the related narrative information and its semantic role in the story. Key-words : Action description, state description, importance, story processing.