ABSTRACT:
This paper presents the results of a large project, which investigated the psycholinguistic processes that occur when reading or hearing a meaningful chapter of a literary text.
Since Bartlett’s famous experiment "The War of the Ghosts" in 1932 very little has been done in this respect. In his experiment Bartlett had shown that the recollection of an American Indian tale was greatly influenced by the different cultural backgrounds of his subjects.
For her experiment the author chose an episode from the autobiography of the German author Erich Kästner describing an unhappy Christmas Eve in his childhood. The subjects were students in the author’s seminars, about 60% German nationals, the rest from foreign countries.
The text was read to half of the group while the other half was sent out and presented with a written copy of the text for reading. Immediately after this, both groups were asked to write down as much of the text as they remembered and in the way they remembered it.
The evaluation of these statements substantiated Bartlett’s results. Among the more than 400 subjects there were few who did not change anything in the story, in spite of the short interval between input and recall, Germans as well as the students from foreign countries, females somewhat more than males.
On closer examination it became evident that this result was due to an interactive bottom-up, top-down processing. Specific items mentioned in Kastner's episode such as candles, snow, the smell of cookies - without the text actually mentioning Christmas - had led the students to the mental schema "Christmas Eve" - in Germany an emotionally very strong schema - and from there top-down to their own personal Christmas memories with very personal details which they added to the story. This was particularly evident in students from Southern and Eastern European countries, who added, for instance, a big Christmas dinner or the crib with the little baby Jesus under the Christmas tree, details which revealed the different cultural background of these subjects.
These findings seem to reveal a great deal about how we process and recollect literary texts. We do not remember exactly what we hear or read, but we adapt a text to our own personal schemata and cultural background and reconstruct it accordingly.
