Overcoming violations of real-world knowledge in a fantasy-world text
Erinn K. Walsh · University of New Hampshire Scholars Repository (University of New Hampshire at Manchester) · 2016
Fantasy-text is a genre in which events routinely violate the rules we know to be true in the real-world. In six experiments I explored the inherent conflict between unrealistic fictional events and general world knowledge (GWK) to examine these competing sources of information within the context of extended fantasy-narrative. Experiments I-III demonstrated that fantasy-unrelated violations caused measurable disruption to the comprehension of an extended fantasy narrative despite an abundance of contextual support for real-world impossible events that violate GWK. Experiments IV and V demonstrated that fantasy-related violations caused measurable disruption when they occurred at the local level and the fantasy-context stood in direct opposition to the target sentence. However, Experiment VI demonstrated that measurable 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 six experiments are discussed within the context of the RI-Val model.