Table 1.

Verbal protocol coding scheme

Dimension	Definition
Character	Intentional agent. Coded if mentioned by name or anaphoric reference, such as “he,” “she,” “him,” etc.
Object	Concrete concepts that could be manipulated or acted on and were not spaces or characters. Coded if mentioned by name or anaphoric reference, such as “it,” “thing,” etc.
Space	Settings in which events can occur. Coded if mentioned by name or reference, such as “there” or “here.”
Time	Temporal settings in which events can occur. Coded if mentioned by name, such as “early” or “late”; if reference to a temporal interval was made, such as “begin” or “end”; if a temporal adverb was mentioned; or if other temporal references were mentioned, such as “now,” “later,” “day,” “slow,” “fast,” “continuously,” etc.
Goal	A character’s future desired outcome, or a future event/action or plan. Coded if plan/outcome was stated directly (e.g., “going to go fishing”) or if statement was marked as goal-related by words such as “want” or “intend.”
Cause	Causal explanation. Coded if explanation was mentioned for an action described in the text (see the table note below).

We performed two tests to determine whether a statement was a causal explanation. First, we conducted a counter/actual reasoning test based on techniques used by Trabasso and colleagues (Langston & Trabasso, 1999; Trabasso, van den Broek, & Suh, 1989) to identify the presence of causal information in texts. The test had the form “if [explanatory action/condition mentioned in verbal protocol] did not occur, would [action mentioned in text] occur?” The coder’s judgment was based on what was reasonable given the depicted story world. If the coder’s answer to the counterfactual test was “no,” then the statement in the protocol was considered to have causal content. The example statement in the table passes the counterfactual test because, on the basis of what was occurring in the story world, the answer to, “If Raymond was not in a hurry, would he walk briskly?” was “no.” The second test for causal content was a “because” test. For this test, we inserted “because” between the action described in the clause and the candidate statement in the verbal protocol, and then made a sensibility judgment about this new statement. If the new hypothetical statement was judged sensible, then it was considered to have causal content. The above protocol also passes the “because” test. A participant could also signal that they were producing a causal explanation by explicitly using the word “because.” A candidate statement in a verbal protocol needed to pass both the counterfactual and “because” tests to be considered a mention of a cause.