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

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, 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.

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.…”

“…Across a set of studies similar to the current ones, we see that when reading variants of a text encompassing changes to either punctuation or lexis, there was an increase in reading times to the ROI containing the change relative to the rest of the sentence that remained unchanged (Carrol et al, 2015; Parente et al, 2019). There was no evidence in the reading record to suggest that changes to punctuation were less noticeable than changes to lexical items or word order; in fact the results in Parente et al indicated that ROIs with punctuation changes require greater processing effort, demonstrating that identifying small changes in punctuation is more effortful, which aligns with the participants’ difficulty with consciously identifying changes in punctuation, with punctuation changes being identified significantly less accurately.…”

“…This was not the case for punctuation changes, which may suggest that such features are deemed minor variations with limited interpretative significance. Parente et al (2019), using pairs of sentences that only had one change, investigated the influence of reader expertise and whether performance was influenced by a task-specific 'spot-the-difference' effect. They found ROIs with punctuation changes required greater processing effort, demonstrating that identifying changes in punctuation is more effortful, which aligns with the participants' difficulty with consciously identifying changes in punctuation.…”

“…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.…”