Linguistic correlates of self in deceptive oral autobiographical narratives.

The current study collected orally-delivered autobiographical narratives from a sample of 44 undergraduate students. Participants were asked to produce both deceptive and non-deceptive versions of their narrative to two specific autobiographical question prompts while standing in front of a video camera. Narratives were then analyzed with Coh-Metrix software on 33 indices of linguistic cohesion. Following a Bonferroni correction for the large number of linguistic variables (p<.002), results indicated that the deceptive narratives contained more explicit action verbs, less linguistic complexity, and less referential coherence (sentences being cohesive with each other). The results support a theory that, in deceptive narratives, there is greater narrative distance between the self that narrates and the self that is narrated about. This suggests that narrative selves are constituted not as autonomous selves, but are subject to processes (e.g., psychological, linguistic, social) that are likely operating on a subconscious level.

The presence of an event in the narrated situation affects its availability to the comprehender.

Narrative descriptions of events often depart from how these events would have occurred in "real time." For example, narratives often contain time shifts in which events that are irrelevant to the plot are omitted. Zwaan (1996) has shown that these time shifts may affect on-line comprehension. Specifically, they are associated with increases in processing load and a deactivation of previous information. The experiments in the present article show that the situation is more complex. Specifically, there is only a deactivation of previous events if they are not assumed to be ongoing after a time shift. Furthermore, explicit discontinuations of events, as in he stopped walking also lead to deactivations when compared with explicit continuations and resumptions.