This paper reports the results of four experiments that investigate how readers determine the perspective holder for free reports in narratives. Free reports can be interpreted as descriptions of someone’s perceptions or thoughts. I tested the effect of the following factors on how free reports are anchored: narration type (first-person vs. third-person), local prominence (whether or not a character has just been explicitly mentioned as a perceiver or thinker), global prominence (whether a character is the discourse topic), and type of free report (perception vs. thought). The findings suggest that readers tend to ascribe free reports to the locally prominent character and are more likely to do so in third-person narratives compared to first-person ones. Speaker preference is in general strong when there are multiple locally prominent characters. In that case, the globally prominent character is more likely to be preferred as an anchor for free thought reports in third-person stories. Overall, free thought reports were not found to be different from free perception reports. Based on the present findings, the following anchoring hierarchy is hypothesised: locally prominent character > narrator > globally prominent character, where the most plausible anchor is the character mentioned to be the experiencer of an event.

中文翻译：

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谁知道？谁在想？在叙事中锚定免费的知觉和思想报道

本文报告了四个实验的结果，这些实验研究了读者如何确定叙事中免费报告的观点持有人。免费报告可以解释为对某人的看法或想法的描述。我测试了以下因素对免费报告锚定方式的影响：旁白类型（第一人称与第三人称视角），局部突出（无论角色是否刚刚被明确提及为感知者或思想家），整体突出（无论是人物还是话题），以及自由举报的类型（感知还是思想）。调查结果表明，读者倾向于将免费报告归因于本地突出的人物，与第一人称叙事相比，在第三人称叙事中更可能这样做。当存在多个本地突出字符时，说话者的偏好通常很强。在这种情况下，全球知名人物更可能被首选为第三人称故事中自由思想报道的锚点。总体而言，自由思想报告与自由知觉报告没有区别。根据目前的发现，假设以下锚定层次结构：局部突出角色>讲述人>全局突出角色，其中最合理的锚定是被提及为事件体验者的角色。