Understanding Short Stories: An American-Hungarian Cross-Cultural Study

This article presents a cross-cultural study about the relationship between story understanding, memory, and attitude towards the contents of a story. An American and a Hungarian short story dealing with the social class versus repression dimension were used. Thirty-four American freshmen (average age 18.5) and forty-eight Hungarian secondary school students (average 17.5) took part in the study. Half of each population read one, the second half the other story, in three-three segments. Following the reading of a segment, the subjects reported their understanding, answering some questions. They were asked to recognize some sentences in a set of original and false, aggressive, cooperative, evasive versions on 7 seven-point scales; and judged the content of the sentences from the points of view of refusal, activity, aggressivity, security, oppression, strength, and anxiety on 5-point scales. There were significant cross-cultural differences between the two populations in the frequency of the response-items of understanding and the recognition of sentences and in the content of the response-categories of understanding and the sensitivity towards aggressivity, oppression and anxiety. The results are discussed in terms of different issues of the social role of literature and literary competence on the one hand, and as those of some culture-dependent themes that influence literary understanding on the other hand.