Abstract: Moving window method was used to investigate the role of causal relationship in the process of spatial information during narrative comprehension.Subjects were undergraduate students from South China Normal University.According to the causal relationship between spatial information and outcome of the story, materials in experiments 1 and 2 were respectively divided into causal version in which spatial information was causally related to outcome and control version in which spatial information was unrelated to outcome.Paired-samples T test was used to compare reaction time of object probes in different conditions.The result showed that causal information had effect not only on the process of explicit spatial information but also on the construct ion of situation model about implicit spatial information.Materials in Experiment 3 were divided into related version and unrelated version, according to the spatial relat ionship between object and location word.The result further demonstrated that situation model about implicit spatial relationship was backwardly constructed in order to keep the whole story coherent causally.In Experiment 4, spatial relat ionship was made more complex to find that readers could not backwardly construct situation model even if it was useful to keep the story causally coherent.

Key words: situation model of space, backward construction, causal coherence