Story Grammar
A cognitive-psychology framework for the structural regularities of narrative text. The dominant formulation, Stein and Glenn (1979), models a story as a setting plus one or more episodes, each consisting of an initiating event, an internal response, an attempt, a consequence, and a reaction. Mandler and Johnson (1977) and Rumelhart (1975) proposed earlier variants; the Stein and Glenn rules became the most-cited reference set in research on children's narrative comprehension and production.
The episode structure
Within Stein and Glenn's framework a complete episode contains:
- Setting: introduction of characters, time, and place.
- Initiating event: the trigger that starts the action.
- Internal response: the protagonist's emotional or cognitive reaction, including goal formation.
- Attempt: action the protagonist takes toward the goal.
- Consequence: the outcome of the attempt.
- Reaction: the protagonist's response to the consequence and any thematic resolution.
A story can be a single episode or a chain of episodes, with each episode's consequence sometimes feeding the next episode's initiating event. Mature readers parse narrative against this template implicitly, which is why narrative passages place a lower processing load than expository text on most readers.
Why it matters for reading and reading assessment
Narrative familiarity is itself a schema. Readers recognise the story-grammar template from oral tradition and early literacy and use it to predict what comes next, anchor characters across long-distance anaphora, and integrate inferences. This is what Coh-Metrix's narrativity dimension captures and why narrative passages score easier on cohesion-aware readability tools than expository texts of equal lexical difficulty.
For reading assessment, story grammar has two implications. First, narrative passages cannot be assumed to discriminate at upper proficiency: the schema scaffolds candidates' comprehension and compresses the distribution of scores. Tests aiming to separate B2 from C1 readers should not rely on narrative alone. Second, for early-grade and lower-proficiency assessment, narrative is fairer than expository because the genre's familiarity reduces construct-irrelevant variance from rhetorical-structure unfamiliarity.
Key References
- Stein, N. L. & Glenn, C. G. (1979). An analysis of story comprehension in elementary school children. In R. O. Freedle (ed.), New Directions in Discourse Processing (Vol. 2, pp. 53–120). Ablex.
- Mandler, J. M. & Johnson, N. S. (1977). Remembrance of things parsed: Story structure and recall. Cognitive Psychology, 9(1), 111–151.
- Rumelhart, D. E. (1975). Notes on a schema for stories. In D. G. Bobrow & A. M. Collins (eds.), Representation and Understanding (pp. 211–236). Academic Press.
See Also
- Schema Theory: the broader cognitive frame
- Text Type: where narrative sits among rhetorical modes
- Reading Comprehension Test Design: how genre choice interacts with discrimination