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Article published In: Scientific Study of Literature
Vol. 9:1 (2019) ► pp.3–33

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Reader expertise and the literary significance of small-scale textual features in prose fiction

 | University of Nottingham
 | University of Nottingham | Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics
 | University of Nottingham
 | University of Birmingham
 | University of Nottingham
Published online: 4 February 2020
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ssol.19006.par
Abstract
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, G., Conklin, K., Guy, J., & Scott, R. (2016). Processing punctuation and word changes in different editions of prose fiction. Scientific Study of Literature, 5(2), 200–228. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). 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.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Experiment 1
    • Method
    • Materials
    • Participants
    • Apparatus and procedure
    • Results
    • Reading time data
    • Response data on change detection
    • Discussion
  • Experiment 2
    • Method
    • Materials
    • Participants
    • Apparatus and procedure
    • Results
    • Reading time data
    • Response data on change detection
    • Discussion
  • General discussion
  • References
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Cited by one other publication

Parente, Fabio, Kathy Conklin, Josephine M Guy & Rebekah Scott
2021. The role of empirical methods in investigating readers’ constructions of authorial creativity in literary reading. Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 30:1 ► pp. 21 ff. DOI logo

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