The effects of narrative voice and focalization on literary text understanding: an ERP investigation

Narrative voice and focalization are two essential narrative techniques, but their roles in understanding narrative texts still need to be determined. This study uses Event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate how auditory comprehension of literary text is affected by narrative voice and mode of focalization, and how these influences are moderated by individual differences in social cognition (e.g., mind-reading ability). Thirty-six valid native speakers of Chinese were finally involved in this study. The findings revealed that pronouns in first-person narration generated a stronger early positivity (P200) compared to pronouns in third-person narration, irrespective of whether the story was narrated from the character’s perspective (internal focalization) or the narrator’s perspective (external focalization). Importantly, in the later stage, the third-person narration elicited a greater sustained negativity (N600) than the first-person narration when the story was internally focalized. However, there was no distinction between the two voices when the story was externally focalized. Additionally, a positive correlation was found between the negativity difference effect (third-person pronoun vs. first-person pronoun) and the comprehenders’ social cognition performance when the story had internal focalization. These findings suggest that the existing debates regarding the functional differences between first-person and third-person narration cannot be resolved unless additional narrative techniques, such as focalization, are considered.