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- Volume 10, Issue 2, 2020
Scientific Study of Literature - Volume 10, Issue 2, 2020
Volume 10, Issue 2, 2020
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Fact or fiction?
Author(s): Natasha Chlebuch, Thalia R. Goldstein and Deena Skolnick Weisbergpp.: 167–192 (26)More LessAbstractMany studies have claimed to find that reading fiction leads to improvements in social cognition. But this work has left open the critical question of whether any type of narrative, fictional or nonfictional, might have similar effects. To address this question, as well as to test whether framing a narrative as fiction matters, the current studies presented participants (N = 268 in Study 1; N = 362 in Study 2) with literary fiction texts, narrative nonfiction texts, expository nonfiction texts, or no texts. We tested their theory-of-mind abilities using the picture-based Reading the Mind in the Eyes task and a text-based test of higher-order social cognition. Reading anything was associated with higher scores compared to reading nothing, but the effects of framing and text type were inconsistent. These results suggest that prior claims regarding positive effects of reading fiction on mentalizing should be seen as tenuous; other mechanisms may be driving previously published effects.
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How professional readers process unnatural narrators
Author(s): Jan Alber, Jessica Jumpertz and Axel Mayerpp.: 193–213 (21)More LessAbstractIn an experiment, the authors tried to find out how professional readers deal with unnatural narrators (such as a narrating parrot and a speaking coin). The hypotheses and research questions were mostly derived from Jan Alber’s proposed reading strategies and operationalized to be measured with the help of a close-ended questionnaire. Thirty-two students of English from RWTH Aachen University took part in the study and were presented with four text passages that featured two natural and two unnatural first-person narrators. These excerpts represented a gliding scale of defamiliarization or estrangement in the sense of Shklovsky that ranges from (1) a realist backpacking tourist in India to (2) a narrator who suffers from hallucinations (both natural), and from there to (3) a narrating parrot and, finally, (4) a speaking coin (both unnatural).
The results indicate that the participants perceived the narratives that featured unnatural narrators as being more estranging than the ones that contained natural narrators, and that unnaturalness was regarded as an indicator of fictionality. Furthermore, it was easier for the participants to emotionally engage with the natural (compared to the unnatural) narrators. The study also shows that blending was used as a strategy to make sense of the unnatural narrators, and that the participants thought that fictional worlds were relevant for their own world experiences – regardless of whether the narrators were unnatural or not. Furthermore, most of the participants were reminded of familiar genres (fantasy stories or fairy tales) when they dealt with the unnatural narrators.
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Reader reactions to psychological perspective*
Author(s): Peter Dixon, Sara Saadat and Marisa Bortolussipp.: 214–227 (14)More LessAbstractIn this study, we used latent variable analysis to distinguish two components of reader reactions to narrative fiction: Evaluative reaction is the extent to which a character is seen as reasonable and rational, and experiential reaction is the extent to which the reader feels similar to and identifies with the character. We found that evaluative reaction was more negative when mental access to the character was provided, while experiential reaction was decreased by the use of a first-person (as opposed to third-person) narrator. These results were explained in terms of the additional cognitive processing engendered by the these narrative techniques. In particular, we hypothesized that a paucity of mental access leads readers to make their own inferences about the character’s mental state, while the use of third-person narration leads readers to draw on their personal experience in order to appreciate the circumstances of the character.
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The role of linguistic prosody in the responses to recited poetry
Author(s): Svetlana Postarnak, São Luís Castro and Susana Silvapp.: 228–249 (22)More LessAbstractPsychological studies of poetry have focused on the responses to written text, and little is known on how choices made by reciters affect listeners’ responses. We hypothesized that syntax-compatible prosodic cues – pauses and pitch breaks – would increase preference by increasing comprehension. Participants rated different declamations of the same poem for preference and comprehension. The match between syntactic boundaries and linguistic prosody cues was quantified in each version, and then we tested how this match predicted listeners’ responses. Unlike our predictions, linguistic prosody had opposite effects on comprehension vs. preference: Comprehension was enhanced by using both sentence pauses and clause pitch breaks, while avoiding clause pauses. When controlling for comprehension, preference was enhanced by clause pauses but hampered by clause breaks and sentence pauses. Results are consistent with the possibility that listeners enjoyed losing track of syntactic boundaries, in line with the idea that deviation may lead to pleasure.
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