Who said what? Source memory for narrator and character agents in literary short stories.

One dimension of reading literacy involves the tracking of agents associated with the text. In a literary short story, there is a society of character agents and pragmatic agents. This study investigated the relative salience of different classes of agents in memory. Two experiments measured source memory as an index of agent salience in long-term memory. Patterns of source memory scores supported an invisible third-person narrator hypothesis and an agent amalgamation hypothesis, but not a structural prominence hypothesis: First-person narrator > nonnarrator character > third-person narrator > 0. Statement detection parameters did not significantly differ among the 3 classes of agents, so differences in source memory could not be explained by differences in the content of the speech acts. Source memory scores also could not be explained by surface features of the text, differences among readers, and sophisticated guessing on the basis of a story abstract.