Abstract: In narratives, authors craft their stories by using the mysteries to attract people who read them. In fact, the information authors choose not to relate is precisely what impels readers to continue reading. Previous researchers defined a type of character appeared in the text comprehension without any connection to the rest of the story as mystery character. The Construction-Integration Model (Kintsch, 1988) specifies how a text moves from short-term memory to long-term memory in cycles. In each cycle, propositions from the text enter short-term memory, which are connected to each other by argument overlap, and then the resulting representation is copied into long-term memory. Nevertheless, some propositions that cannot be connected to any of the propositions from the rest of text or the long-term memory are held over to the next cycle in short-term memory. As a result, the propositions, such as mystery characters, remain more available through subsequent text than characters who are not mysterious. Moreover, recycling mystery characters in short-term memory left diminished resources for the processing of subsequent propositions, which resulted in the weaker encoding of the following propositions. Some researchers had provided evidences that a mystery character introduced without information linking him or her to the story affected readers’ narrative processing. The systematic analysis of previous theories and evidences about the topic that how mystery characters affected readers’ text comprehension raised another important question that with new information entering into our brain, whether the mystery characters still held available in short-term memory, or it had been pushed into long-term memory with susceptibility. This research was intended to throw light on the question mentioned above. We conducted two experiments. Experiment 1 was designed in a new condition to explore whether a mystery character still remained more available in short-term memory through subsequent text than character who was not mysterious. Experiment 2, including two sub-experiments, was further to explore when the sentence which contained mystery character was pushed into long-term memory, the mystery character with susceptibility was in short-term memory or in long-term memory. All materials were presented on a monitor controlled by computer. Participants were instructed to read each story line by line at a regular reading pace, pressing the space bar to advance to next line. And everyone should read story carefully so that they would be able to judge whether the probe word appeared in the text. The results showed that, in the new condition, the mystery character still remained available in short-term memory, at the expense of processing for subsequent information. And when the sentence consisted of mystery character was entered into long-term memory, the mystery character was also encoded into it with susceptibility and was easy to be activated by relevant information. In conclusion, the present research indicates that when readers are presented with a mystery character in text comprehension, there is an impact on their narrative processing, which also verifies the mystery characters can be explained by the bi-processing theory of text comprehension about focus-based processing.

Key words: narrative processing, mystery character, susceptibility