Scientific Study of Literature - Volume 9, Issue 1, 2019

We use eye tracking to investigate the attention readers pay to different textual features to determine their significance in the appreciation of prose fiction. Previous research examined attention allocation to lexical and punctuation variants, and the impact on reading dynamics for the remainder of the text, demonstrating that readers notice both kinds of variants but assign less value to the latter (Carrol, Conklin, Guy, & Scott, 2016). Here, in two experiments, we examine two conditions that may affect attention allocation: We investigate the influence of reader expertise (Experiment 1) and whether performance is influenced by a task-specific “spot-the-difference” effect (Experiment 2). We found that expertise plays little role in readers’ greater sensitivity to lexical rather than punctuation changes, and that the advantage for lexical changes persisted when the time interval between exposures is increased. These results confirm earlier findings: that small-scale features may not possess the creative significance predicated of them by critics and text-editors.

We test the literariness of genre fiction with an empirical study that directly manipulates both intrinsic text properties and extrinsic reader expectations of literary merit for science-fiction and narrative-realism stories. Participants were told they were going to read a story of either low or high literary merit and then read one of two stories that were identical except for one genre-determining word. There were no differences between the science-fiction and narrative-realism versions of the story in literary merit perception, text comprehension, or inference effort for theory of mind and plot. Participants did, however, exert more theory-of-world effort (i.e., world-building) for the science-fiction version. The more inference effort science-fiction readers dedicated to theory of world, the more cognitively and emotionally engaged they were. These results contradict the assumption that science fiction cannot achieve literariness and instead demonstrate a “literary genre effect.”

This paper describes a structural account of phonetic symbolism and submits it to empirical investigation. To enable testing for possible iconic sound–emotion relations, participants compared pairs of syllables (e.g., ma – ba) as well as pairs of emotional states (e.g., joyful – sad) on various perceptual scales (e.g., softness). In addition, we replicated the classic ‘bouba/kiki’ experiment to investigate sound-shape symbolism. In accordance with the theoretical model, the results of the experimental tasks suggest that participants can detect abstract similarities between speech sounds and emotions as well as geometrical shapes. We discuss the theoretical model and the experimental results in relation to previous empirical findings and conflicting evidence from the study of affective iconicity in poetry.

Multiple decades of psycholinguistic research exploring people’s reading of different types of language has delivered much improved understanding of textual comprehension experience. Psycholinguistic studies have typically focused on a few cognitive and linguistic processes presumed to be central in reading comprehension of language, but this emphasis has omitted other processes and products readers commonly experience in their imaginative, aesthetic encounters with literature. Our paper describes some of the limitations of psycholinguistics for explaining people’s literary experiences. Nonetheless, we argue that recent research on embodied simulation processes may help close the gap between psycholinguistics, with its emphasis on generic processes of non-literary language use, and studies associated with the scientific study of literature with their focus on phenomenological, lived reactions to literary texts.