Focalization is such an intrinsic component of narrative that readers are often unaware of its effect. With internal focalization, an actor within the story narrates the events from their vantage point, flavoring the story with their perspective. While extant research demonstrates that many features of narrative structure influence how readers encode narrative information, little empirical research has investigated focalization. This dissertation investigates whether readers encode focalization in their mental models of a story in a way that influences their memory for narrative information. I hypothesized that readers would associate narrative information--in particular, narrated similes--with the focalized perspective that introduced the simile. If readers do construct their models in a way that associates narrative information with the focalized perspective, then the accessibility of the narrated information should vary as a function of the salience of the focalization through which it was presented. To test this hypothesis, I developed a set of narrative stimuli in which I alternated the internal focalization between two characters to create two versions of each story with different focalization patterns. In Experiment 1, I compared narratives that reinstated the initial focalization after a switch with those that did not reinstate the initial focalization. I expected participants to be faster and more accurate in responding to a recognition test for the target simile if the focalization returned to the character associated with the target simile. This hypothesis was not supported. In Experiment 2, I reduced the number of focalization shifts per story, but found similar null results. Therefore, in Experiment 3 I modified the stimuli further to explicitly attribute the target information to the focalized perspective. Again, I found no differences in accuracy or response time dependent on focalization. For Experiment 4, I simplified the stimuli by testing literal target information instead of similes, and once again did not find an effect of focalization. Overall, this project did not produce evidence that readers incorporate focalization into their mental models in the same way that they do other features of narrative, but I suggest that further research on the effects of focalization on reading processes is warranted. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]