Story Grammars
At the level of the story, structure may emerge which connects
otherwise disparate parts. The mental respresntation of the
whole of the story is refered to as the situation model.
Event Segmentation theory focuses on the events, but something
must link events together in memory to form a situation model.
I put together these graphs to index locations in a story
where listeners will likely be linking parts of the story
via causal connnections.
I then counted the number of nodes on each sentence
to get a sense of "how important" each sentence was to the plot.
Previous researchers like Trabasso and Sperry (1985) and
Van den Broek et al (1999), have found these links
to be important for predciting what people remember of stories.
These tree diagrams of the causal connections copy what
Trabasso and Sperry, 1985 did. This time I'm doing it for
larger stories. The diagrams get out of hand.
These may also offer an interesting way to understand how
events are linked in situation models.
I've added some images of these trees below.
