STRUCTURALLY EQUIVALENT STORIES IN MOVIE AND TEXT AND THE EFFECT OF THE MEDIUM ON RECALL

A technique was devised for constructing a text story which subjects agreed matched the dialogueless movie The Red Balloon in episodic structure. It relied partly on subjects judging where episodes and their components-exposition, complication, and resolution-were located in the stories. Text judgments were made using copies of the text; movie judgments utilized a 588-photo flip book made from movie frames. The stories were structurally equivalent: they each contained 14 episodes, and subjects agreed that structural boundaries in one story mapped to precise locations in the other story. In cued recall, with medium (movie versus text) and delay (zero versus 7-day) as variables, recall of structural statements was very similar in both media but deteriorated faster for text subjects. Differences in content in movie and text recall protocols were discussed in terms of several factors, including differential world knowledge influence. © 1979 Academic Press, Inc.