Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The understanding of simple, narrative episodes in which a protagonist successfully realizes a goal through a sequence of actions is studied. In two experiments, subjects rated the acceptability of sentences of the form "The protagonist does ACT J^ in order that the protagonist could ACT 2", where ACT 2 and ACT }_ were actions from the episode. Ratings were predicted by (I.e., inversely related to) distance within a narrative representation which organizes actions into sequences (action chains) reflecting aspects of the problem-solving plan employed by the protagonist. Subjects separated action chains that had been interleaved in a text. Mishap, irrelevant, and restorative actions were not incorporated directly into an attempt structure. Corrective actions, undoing the ill effects of mishaps, were incorporated. Further research is suggested.