THE PRESENTATION MODALITY AND TEXT TYPE EFFECTS ON STORY MEMORY AND UNDERSTANDING

This study examined the modality and text type effects on story memory and understanding, The materials were made of three different types of text, reorganized from an Europian old tale: declarative, colloquial and introspective versi on. After reading or listening to one of the given texts, 96 subjects were to recall them and rate their memorability, imageability, understandability and the main characters'impressions. The results showed that the presentation modality and text type had little effect on a text recall. However, subjects rated the texts' memorability and understandability higher in auditory condition than in visual condition ; and also the degree of empathy to the heroine was found higher in colloquial or introspective conditions than in declarative condition. These results indicated that the recall and various self-rating measures reflected different aspects of story processing, and the necessity of both types of measures for a research in story understanding were discussed.