Processing punctuation and word changes in different editions of prose fiction

Abstract

A note on versions:The version presented here may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the repository url above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription.For more information, please contact eprints@nottingham.ac.uk This is only a preprint version of the citable published paper. The actual published version may be somewhat different due to editors' corrections and additional modifications. Only the published version should be considered authoritative. All citations and quotes should be from the published version, and page references should be from the published version. The digital era has brought with it a shift in the field of literary editing in terms of the amount and kind of textual variation that can reasonably be annotated by editors.However, questions remain about how far readers engage with textual variants, especially minor ones such as small-scale changes to punctuation. In this study we present an eye-tracking experiment investigating reader sensitivity to variations in surface textual features of prose fiction. We monitored eye movements while participants read textual variants from Dickens and James, hypothesising that readers may pay more attention to lexical rather than punctuation changes. We found longer reading times for both types, but only lexical changes also increased reading times for the rest of the sentence. In addition, eye movement behaviour and conscious ability to report changes were highly correlated. We discuss the implications for how such methods might be applied to questions of "literary" significance and textual processing.

The role of empirical methods in investigating readers’ constructions of authorial creativity in literary reading

“…However, neither the attribution of a change nor its nature appeared to significantly affect participants' ability to correctly report it. These findings run contrary to our most recent observations (Parente et al, 2019), while being more consistent with the original findings by Carrol et al (2015). It is possible that the mere act of providing readers with an ostensible origin for a variant may change their attitude towards the task itself; this, coupled with the back-to-back presentation of each pair of sentences, could have led to more engaged and attentive reading and to less discrimination between substantive and minor variants.…”

“…In these two studies, readers encountered pairs of sentences that differed in some way between the two editions in terms of lexis and/or punctuation. Carrol et al (2015), in sentences that had one or two changes, showed an increase in reading times to the ROI containing the change relative to the rest of the sentence that remained unchanged. There was no evidence in the reading record to suggest that changes to punctuation were less noticeable than changes to lexical items.…”

“…Research by Carrol et al (2015) has demonstrated how eye-tracking can be used to determine which linguistic features, including fine-grained ones such as punctuation, readers pay most attention to during literary reading. Experiments can therefore be set up to test literary stylisticians' hypotheses about what constitutes literary language, in the sense of demonstrating whether readers are actually noticing the specific linguistic features posited as being implicated in the generation of literary meaning, such as those associated with foregrounding effects, or with stylistic novelty or complexity.…”

“…For the purposes of data analysis, sentences were divided into three ROIs as in previous studies (Carrol et al, 2015). A critical ROI was defined as the word or words that had changed between two versions.…”

“…Also important for the current study is previous research on how readers process punctuation (Hill and Murray, 2000; Hirotani et al, 2006). While most studies compared reading in sentences with no punctuation to those that were punctuated, two eye-tracking studies investigated the impact of changes in sentence internal punctuation to already well punctuated sentences, by presenting readers with extracts from the 1846 and 1867 editions of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist and from the 1881 and 1908 editions of Henry James’s The Portrai t of a Lady (Carrol et al, 2015; Parente et al, 2019). In these two studies, readers encountered pairs of sentences that differed in some way between the two editions in terms of lexis and/or punctuation.…”