1. Introduction
Readers are said to be
immersed in a story when they experience it as if they were part of it. Immersion may be defined as a “state of cognitive, emotional, and imaginative absorption” within the story world (
Hartung et al. 2017b, p. 2). The experience of immersion is not identical for everyone; what immersion entails largely depends on someone’s personal preferences (
Hartung et al. 2017a) and their disposition to imagination and empathy (
Hartung et al. 2016,
2017b;
Mak and Willems 2019). Reading habits also contribute to what immersion looks like for each reader: more habitual readers are generally able to experience immersion more deeply and with more ease than those who read sparingly (
Mak et al. 2020). Despite the variety of immersive states, researchers agree on what immersion generally looks like: readers mentally re-enact described actions and emotions, create images in their mind, feel transported into the story world, and/or think along with the characters of a story (
Green and Brock 2000;
Shanton and Goldman 2010;
Kuijpers et al. 2014).
Moreover, the experience of immersion varies for an individual depending on the actual reading material at hand (
Kuijpers et al. 2014;
Hartung et al. 2017b;
van Krieken et al. 2017): an instruction manual will probably immerse a reader much less than a fantasy novel. It is generally assumed that the narrative genre promotes immersion with much more ease than other genres because of a perceived similarity with narrative characters, the use of suspense, and view-point techniques. That is, a key feature of narratives that modulates the experience of immersion is the narrative perspective (see
Sanders and Redeker 1996).
Narratives are commonly written from a third-person perspective, with an omniscient narrator who is external to the story telling the reader about what the characters feel and do. Narratives may also be written from a first-person perspective, where the narrator is typically one of the characters describing events from his or her own limited perspective. Narrative points of view, and the corresponding linguistic cues, have been shown to impact readers’ perspective-taking: reading in the third person elicits an external or onlooker’s perspective, while reading in the first person prompts the reader to adopt an internal or agent perspective (
Brunyé et al. 2009;
Ditman et al. 2010). That is, in reading a sentence like “I cut a tomato”, the reader imagines themselves doing the cutting; when the sentence is “He/she cuts a tomato”, the reader feels as if they see someone else cutting it.
Crucially, assuming a point of view while reading is linked to immersion into the story: an experimental study by
Hartung et al. (
2016) investigating the effect of perspective-taking on immersion reports that reading Dutch short stories in first (versus third) person resulted in readers reporting higher levels of immersion. They also measured the electrodermal activity (EDA) of the participants while reading. This method provides a measure of a person’s arousal through small changes in the glands in the skin. They found increased arousal through EDA while people read third-person stories rather than first-person stories. Hartung et al. interpret these results by assuming that third-person stories involve a higher cognitive demand than first-person stories: in third-person stories, readers may adopt the points of view of multiple characters and, thus, anticipate having to do so even when it is unnecessary for the understanding of the story. The increased processing load of reading third-person perspective results in a less immersive experience for the reader. Moreover, a subsequent study by
Hartung et al. (
2017b) reports that first-person stories generate higher levels of emotional engagement with the characters than third-person stories. Reading times were measured so as to explore whether the increase in processing load is reflected in reading behavior, but no significant differences between narrative perspectives were found.
In the present study, we reinvestigate the effect of first- versus third-person perspective on immersion in French short stories by means of a self-paced reading experiment and a post-hoc questionnaire collecting reports of the immersive state of participants. We suspect that the measures used in
Hartung et al. (
2017b) were not sensitive enough to capture an effect of the pronoun type, as they measured the time spent on the full stories, i.e., the time from the onset of the full-text fragment presentation until the button press. In our experiment, we instead measure reading times for the pronouns themselves (and the spillover regions). Thus, we collect a measure that reflects the online processing cost of first- and third-person pronouns (in the short story), as well as an off-line measure that reflects participants’ self-reported post-hoc immersion in the story (in the questionnaire). Our hypotheses are as follows:
H1: Third-person pronouns are read more slowly than first-person pronouns.
H2: First-person short stories lead to higher reader immersion reports than third-person short stories.
Narratives written from a second-person perspective are traditionally less common (see
Fludernik 1994), and their effect on immersion remains understudied. However, we will not include second-person narratives in our study because of the referential complexity of the second person in narratives (it is not easy to determine who the intended addressee is), and the fact that many languages have a bipartite or tripartite second-person pronominal system. An investigation of second-person narratives deserves its own in-depth study.
Still, there is recent interest in the effects of second-person pronouns on processing, particularly when a second-person pronoun is used to address the interlocutor directly. Pronouns of address have been found to affect people’s attitudes to, evaluations of, and involvement with real and experimental material.
Cruz et al. (
2017), for example, investigated social media users’ involvement with online ads in English. They found that when ads contained a form of the second-person pronoun
you, users were more likely to interact (i.e., like, share, and comment) with the ad, compared to ads without any pronouns of address. This might be due to the fact that pronouns of address have a self-ascriptive ability (
Wechsler 2010;
de Hoop and Tarenskeen 2015), where addressees are more ready to interpret the pronoun as a deictic rather than a generic reference.
For languages that use two or more second-person pronouns (e.g., Dutch
jij and
u, German
Sie and
du, French
tu and
vous), additional factors come into play revolving around the particular second-person pronoun. Such languages present speakers with a choice not based on grammatical rules, but on social norms. Traditionally, constructs such as power, solidarity, respect, and distance were applied to explain the variation in the use of these pronouns of address. Pronouns of address are usually categorized as formal (or V, from Latin
vos) or informal (or T, from Latin
tu) (
Brown and Gilman 1960). Several studies looked into how Netherlandic Dutch speakers’ attitudes towards commercial and corporate communications are affected by the use of a T (
jij) or a V (
u) pronoun of address (
van Zalk and Jansen 2004;
Leung et al. 2022;
de Hoop et al. 2023;
Sadowski et al. 2024;
Schoenmakers et al. 2024). There is a general preference for T pronouns among speakers of Dutch in The Netherlands (
Vismans 2013;
Levshina 2017), which led researchers to hypothesize that consumers’ evaluations would be more positive when addressed with T than V pronouns. Indeed,
Leung et al. (
2022) found that Dutch consumers prefer to be addressed with T forms in commercial communications rather than V forms in general.
Schoenmakers et al. (
2024) found that T-use in commercial advertising leads to a higher appreciation of product advertisements than V, and
Sadowski et al. (
2024) found that T-use leads to more willingness to make monetary donations than V-use, particularly for altruistic participants.
Van Zalk and Jansen (
2004), by contrast, found that Dutch speakers were more positive about an online travel advertisement when it contained V pronouns than T pronouns. However, a post-hoc analysis revealed that, while younger people evaluated both ads with T and V pronouns similarly, older people preferred V pronouns.
Schoenmakers et al. (
2024) and
van Zalk and Jansen (
2004) also found that being highly involved with the material (e.g., the scenarios, the ads, or the brands depicted in the experiment are “effectively relevant to the receiver”,
Zaichkowsky 1986) results in higher appreciation and more positive evaluations regardless of the pronouns of address received.
German T (
du) and V (
Sie) pronouns have also been shown to differentially affect people’s attitudes and evaluations (
den Hartog et al., forthcoming). In German, there seems to be no clear-cut preference for T or V (
Kretzenbacher et al. 2006;
den Hartog et al. 2022).
Den Hartog et al. (forthcoming) designed an online (mock) job interview, where participants (in the role of candidates) saw a series of videos of a recruiter asking them questions while addressing the candidate with either T or V. German participants evaluated the recruiter more positively when they had used V to address participants. In the case of French, the language under investigation in the present paper, the default pronoun used for public communications is the formal
vous ‘you’ (
den Hartog et al. 2022). Meanwhile,
tu is the marked pronoun, restricted to (perceived) intimate contexts where interlocutors know each other well or at least experience a certain sense of (social) proximity (
Warren 2006;
Pager-McClymont et al. 2023). The study of
den Hartog et al. (forthcoming) also tested French participants taking part in a mock job interview: French speakers were significantly more critical in their evaluation of the recruiter when they received T rather than V. The use of T-pronouns by a stranger in a formal situation was perceived as too intimate, or even disrespectful, and was consequently deemed inappropriate.
The studies discussed above provide evidence that speakers of Dutch, German, and French are sensitive to being directly addressed with T- or V-pronouns, and that this sensitiveness is reflected in their evaluations of real and experimental material, as well as their interlocutor. Whether we choose to address our participants with T or V forms may thus impact their attitude towards the task, the materials, and/or the researcher. The effect also depends on the language under investigation, likely driven by differences in cultural practices.
The social norms in France seem to be quite strict in what is an acceptable and unacceptable use of a T-pronoun, as evidenced by the results of
den Hartog et al. (forthcoming). Moreover, research into the choice of T/V by French speakers also highlights that speakers negatively judge a violation of the address practices. French informants in focus groups revealed to
Warren (
2006) that they felt offended or embarrassed when addressed with
tu, or that the speaker was unilaterally trying to establish an undesired relationship by addressing them with the T-form. The informants’ testimonies show that speakers who break the social norms associated with the use of pronouns of address are frowned upon. This is supported by the findings from
Pager-McClymont et al. (
2023), who conducted a survey in which many participants evaluated T-use by a French news channel on their social media platforms as odd because of the “false familiarity” and forced intimacy.
Our investigation is, therefore, not limited to testing putative effects of narrative perspective (first- versus third-person) on immersion, but extends to putative effects of pronouns of address (T versus V) on readers’ (post-hoc) reports of immersion. To that end, we conducted an experiment consisting of a self-paced reading and a questionnaire component. First, we presented French readers with short stories in first or third person. Next, we asked the participants to fill out a questionnaire about their immersion in the story. The questionnaire was either presented in T or in V. Thus, we collected a measure that reflects the on-line processing cost of first- and third-person pronouns (in the short story), as well as an off-line measure that reflects participants’ self-reported immersion in the story (in the questionnaire).
Regarding the T-/V-manipulation in the questionnaire, we expect to observe a difference in the readers’ reported immersion based on the pronoun of address they received (T or V). We expect that French readers have a preference for V-pronouns of address, and judge V-pronouns as appropriate in the context of an experimental setting with unfamiliar researchers. Consequently, receiving a pronoun of address that conforms to readers’ expectations may translate to more appreciation for the task and, by extension, we expect the immersion reports to be higher.
1 Conversely, the use of the T-pronoun may be perceived as inappropriate and could result in a lower level of engagement with the experimental material and a diminished post-hoc sense of immersion (i.e., being confronted with an inappropriate address pronoun in the questionnaire following the reading task “kills the vibe” from immersion), leading to reduced immersion reports. Our hypothesis is as follows:
H3: T-pronouns will lead to poorer reader immersion reports than V-pronouns.
We see no reason to expect the T-/V-manipulation to yield a different effect based on whether it follows a first- or a third-person story, and so we remain agnostic about a potential interaction effect. Finally, to exploratorily obtain an index of the processing difficulty associated with formal and informal second-person pronouns, participants were directly addressed directly in the final sentence of the story (using the French version of the frame “And
you, have
you ever …?”). Participants were presented with the same pronoun of address as they would see in the questionnaire. We expect that the T-forms will be read more slowly than the V-forms because of a surprisal effect due to the use of a non-default or even inappropriate form (
Warren 2006;
Pager-McClymont et al. 2023).
H4: T-pronouns are read more slowly than V-pronouns.
4. Discussion
We investigated the influence of first- and third-person narrative perspectives in French short stories on reading times and reported immersion, and whether being addressed with a formal (vous) or informal (tu) pronoun had any effect on readers’ reports about immersion in the story and on their reading times (of the address pronouns). We asked participants to read two short stories on a laptop, word by word, at their own pace. Each story was narrated in either the first or third person. Then, participants were directly addressed with either V- or T-pronouns in a question at the end of each story and throughout the post-hoc immersion questionnaires. Thus, readers’ immersion was gauged by means of a questionnaire administered after each story, and by measuring their reading times of the pronouns (first or third person) at the word level. Other variables indicating individual characteristics were also recorded, viz. reading habits and preferences.
First, we investigated if perspective (first versus third person) had an impact on reading times due to potential time-sensitive cognitive effects. We expected third-person pronouns to be read more slowly than first-person pronouns (
H1), but we did not find evidence for this hypothesis. However, we note that previous research has not found conclusive evidence for the claim that narrative perspective leads to differences in reading times either (
Hartung et al. 2017b), and so our self-paced reading results rather add to the argument against the notion that one particular perspective poses more processing difficulties than the other (as claimed by
Hartung et al. 2016). In a similar vein,
Hartung et al. (
2017a) suggest that readers simply engage in different modes of perspective-taking regardless of the narrative perspective as a strategy to understand the text, which is supported by different neural networks being activated during their experimental task.
Our results did confirm our second hypothesis (
H2): Readers reported being significantly more immersed after reading first-person than third-person stories. In our study, we observed the effect of perspective on the dimensions
emotional engagement and
narrative understanding. These results differ slightly from what
Hartung et al. (
2016) observed in their experiment: They found effects of perspective in the dimensions
transportation and
mental imagery. However, the fact that an identical general immersion pattern was found suggests that further discrepancies in how participants experience immersion may be due to content-based differences. Different types of reading materials might elicit immersion in different dimensions, as the contents and forms of the text evoke diverse immersive states (
Kuijpers et al. 2014;
Hartung et al. 2017b). So, Hartung et al.’s stories might have contained more visually stimulating language to enhance transportation into the story world, as well as to create mental images of depicted events and physical spaces. Our participants, in turn, experienced heightened
emotional engagement, which might have been caused by more relatable emotional states and situations presented in the stories. This emotional resonance can contribute to a more profound understanding of the characters’ motivations, struggles, and the overall storyline, enhancing the reader’s overall comprehension. Either way, perspective (first versus third person) affects the rate of reported immersion, such that first-person pronouns stimulate immersion.
Further, the finding that appreciation and immersion are positively correlated indicates that, by simply enjoying a story less, readers are less prone to report immersion (cf.
Kuijpers et al. 2014;
Hartung et al. 2016;
Mak and Willems 2019). This finding relates to the variability of the immersion results due to individual differences (see
Mak and Willems 2019 for more discussion). Indeed, we find significant influences on reading habits, such as reading frequency, but also a preference for physical books over e-books. Surprisingly, our French ART measures did not contribute to explaining any of the differences observed on immersion. Further research into triggers of each individual dimension of the immersion spectrum is warranted to unravel this issue.
We also investigated the impact of being addressed with formal or informal second-person pronouns on the rate of reported immersion. We predicted that the two types of address pronouns would distinctly influence the reports of immersion (
H3) based on the strict address norms in France (
Warren 2006;
Pager-McClymont et al. 2023). We did not find a main effect caused by the pronoun of address. However, we did find that readers who had been addressed with
vous after reading first-person stories reported being more immersed than readers who had received
vous after reading third-person stories. The informal pronoun of address did not produce any discernible difference between perspectives in the reported rates of immersion. Address pronouns thus affect how readers reflect on and evaluate their reading experience. This difference may be attributed to cultural expectations and social norms. The narrator and the experimenters are strangers to the participants; the task being conducted is perceived as formal. The expectation and the appropriate address form is V. Adhering to these social expectations can influence the reader’s affinity for the task. Therefore, we find a difference when the social norms are followed, and V is used. However, deviating from social expectations by using T-pronouns can cause a surprisal effect that dampens the effect caused by the story’s perspective. This effect may differ across languages and cultures, contingent on the social norms associated with the use of pronouns of address.
Finally, in an exploratory effort, we tested the reading times of T- and V-pronouns of address in a question directed at the reader after the short story, expecting that T-pronouns would be read more slowly than V-pronouns (
H4). We did not observe an effect of receiving T or V on reading times: no surprisal effect or processing difficulty was registered. We believe that this may be due to the fact that we only tested a single question directly addressing the participants, and only after the participants were already (supposedly) immersed in the first- or third-person story. The question itself, and the sudden addressing, may have been a surprise, overshadowing the putative effect of the T-/V-pronouns. However, we stress that this distinction was evident in the subsequent questionnaire (as per H3), and so we conclude that address pronouns may trigger surprisal effects in French. Future research may experiment with longer fragments with pronouns of address (T/V) to shed more light on this matter.
3Our study only captured differential effects of perspective on immersion indirectly through readers’ reports. Our instruments were adapted from scales validated in multiple studies (SWAS,
Kuijpers et al. 2014; NES,
Busselle and Bilandzic 2009). Our results suggest that these scales might be sensitive to the type of language used in them, in particular, to pronouns of address. Our online measure of immersion, reading times at the word level, is hypothesized to be capable of reflecting differences between cognitive processing of each perspective, but no such effect surfaced in our analyses. Future research could implement more sensitive online measures to detect processing differences driven by perspective, such as EDA as in
Hartung et al. (
2016), eye-tracking, or EEG. These data would provide a more accurate index of real-time immersion.
While our study captures the effects of second-person pronouns in a post-test questionnaire, we did not include a condition with a second-person pronoun in the self-paced reading component of the experiment. Thus, we did not investigate direct effects of second-person pronouns while immersion is happening, as in narratives written in the second person. The second person is not a common narrative perspective, but it is more complex due to the multiplicity of potential referents (see e.g.,
Sorlin 2022) and the fact that the second-person pronoun is allowed a generic reading quite often (
de Hoop and Tarenskeen 2015). Yet research suggests that second-person pronouns may facilitate emotion processing and sense of participation even more so than first- and third-person pronouns, which could translate into higher immersion in the story. Specifically,
Brunyé et al. (
2011,
2016) found that readers easily develop a sense of agency while reading short narratives written in second person and experience higher emotional engagement than the other perspectives through self-ascriptive devices.
Child et al. (
2018) similarly find that readers experience text passages describing positive emotions in a more immersed way when addressed in second person (versus third person) in English, and that the second-person pronoun elicits a higher sensitivity to mismatching emotional information.
Since pronouns of address have been repeatedly shown to affect attitudes towards other people and tasks, it may be worthwhile to explore the use of formal-versus-informal second-person pronouns in narratives and their immersive outcomes. Initial endeavors to study such effects are pursued by
den Hartog et al. (
2024). They investigated the use of T-/V-pronouns in Dutch short stories and found that V has an initial processing cost compared to T (i.e., V is read more slowly at first), which they attribute to their participants (university students) not being used to V-address. They also report that readers experience emotion in narratives differently based on whether the narratives contained V or T pronouns, and this effect is dependent on gender: while male participants respond more negatively to negative texts and more positively to positive texts when V is used, female participants show this pattern when T is used. We leave the question how French T/V pronouns drive immersion in stories as compared to other perspectives to future research.
5. Conclusions
We conducted an experiment with a self-paced reading component and a questionnaire component to study the effect of narrative perspective (first versus third person) and pronoun of address (T versus V) on processing and immersion in French. In the experiment, we collected reading time data (for first- versus third-person pronouns and T versus V pronouns) and self-reported post-story immersion rates. Based on suggestions from the literature, we hypothesized that first-person pronouns and formal pronouns would be read faster than third-person pronouns and informal pronouns, respectively. The rationale for these hypotheses was that (i) third-person pronouns activate the viewpoints of multiple referents and are, therefore, harder to process, and (ii) T-pronouns are non-default and perhaps inappropriate in French and, therefore, trigger a surprisal effect. We did not find evidence for these claims. That we did not find the expected effects may be due to readers employing a reading strategy regardless of individual pronouns, so as to understand the narrative, and for the pronouns of address because of an overall surprisal effect of address after a story.
Furthermore, the post-story questionnaire presented statements using T- or V-pronouns. We expected stories in the first person to yield higher immersion scores than stories in the third person since this effect has been reported before. This prediction was borne out. We also expected T-pronouns to lower the reported immersion scores because of their inappropriateness for the particular situation (at least in French). Although we did not find the hypothesized effect in our data, we did find that T-use nullified the effect of story perspective (or that V-use stimulated it). The interaction between perspective and T/V may thus be explained as follows: we observe that first-person stories trigger a higher reported rate of immersion than third-person stories (due to their higher immersive potential), but this effect in the post-story reports is canceled when an inappropriate pronoun is used to address the participant. Participants are taken aback by the use of the inappropriate T-pronoun and are pulled out of their immersed state, so to speak. This is a novel finding as, to the best of our knowledge, any effects of pronouns of address on the addressees’ attitudes and evaluations were observed solely when the material itself contained pronouns of address (i.e., advertisements).
Pronouns of address may thus have a certain power to affect language users in a psychologically relevant way that is dependent on both individual and cultural factors. We conclude that the processing and the impact of formal and informal pronouns of address deserve further attention.