Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Identifier

383

Date

2011

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Psychology

Concentration

Experimental Psychology

Committee Chair

Max Louwerse

Committee Member

Roger Kreuz

Committee Member

Richard Dale

Committee Member

Craig Stewart

Abstract

Narratives have the ability to impact a person's sense of reality by transporting them into a narrative world. However, the linguistic features of these narratives has been overlooked. Four experiments aimed to investigate which linguistic features may influence these feelings of being transported in text and in film. In the experiments participants read or watched narratives while their reading time, eye behavior, and conscious responses to whether they were feeling transported were recorded. The responses from the first experiment were used to create a formula for scoring narrative on transportability which was subsequently used to predict transportation levels in new text. Results showed that the formula was effective for predicting transportation in text, but not for film. In addition, results for measures of pupil diameter, fixation duration, reading time, and online response while reading/viewing were also found to predict transportation across text and film. The four experiments show that transportation is a construct and that it can be measured using computational methods and online measures.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to the local University of Memphis Electronic Theses & dissertation (ETD) Repository.

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