Lee, M., Roskos-Ewoldsen, B., & Roskos-Ewoldsen, D. R. (2008). Applying the landscape model to comprehending discourse from TV news stories. Discourse Processes, 45(6), 519-544.
Lee, M.; Roskos-Ewoldsen, B.; Roskos-Ewoldsen, D.
2008
Lee, M., Roskos-Ewoldsen, B., & Roskos-Ewoldsen, D. R. (2008). Applying the landscape model to comprehending discourse from TV news stories. Discourse Processes, 45(6), 519-544.
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The Landscape Model of text comprehension was extended to the comprehension of audiovisual discourse from text and video TV news stories. Concepts from the story were coded for activation after each sequence, creating a matrix of activations that was reduced to a vector of the degree of total activation for each concept. In Study 1, the degree vector correlated well with participants' ratings of how much the sequence made them think of each concept. In Study 2, the degree vector, vectors based on the number of activations, and the degree of co-activation were used to predict participants' recall. The model predicted recall for the text version well, but only moderately well for the video version. The Landscape Model was modified using Dual Code Theory by coding and analyzing audio and visual information as separate components. It predicted students' recall well, indicating its robustness as a model of discourse processing.
In Study 2 we used the theoretically based landscapes to predict recall of the text and video versions of the TV story. For the text version, the landscape of activation accounted for an impressive 86% of the variance in participants’ recall. However, for the video version of the story, the landscape accounted for only 32% of the variance in recall. Although 32% is still remarkable, it is clearly not as impressive as is the variance in recall for text stories (86% here, 64% in van den Broek et al., 1996). The discrepancy between the text and video versions suggested that comprehension of TV news stories differs from the comprehension of text stories. The question is, how are they different? Our results indicated that our participants paid most attention to the verbal aspects of the news story. To the extent that our participants are typical, this suggests that the visual aspects of a TV news story are represented in memory but are overwhelmed by the verbal representations.
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