Aspects of Literary Comprehension: A Cognitive ApproachGiven the fact that there are widely different types of text, it is unlikely that every text is processed in the same way. It is assumed here that for each text type, proficient readers have developed a particular cognitive control system, which regulates the basic operations of text comprehension. The book focuses on the comprehension of literary texts, which involves specific cognitive strategies that enable the reader to respond flexibly to the indeterminacies of the literary reading situation. The study relies heavily on methods and theoretical conceptions from cognitive psychology and presents the results of experiments carried out with real readers. The results are not only relevant to research problems in literary theory, but also to the study of discourse comprehension in general. |
Contents
1 FRAMING LITERARY COMPREHENSION | 1 |
2 READINGRATE AND SURFACESTRUCTURE REPRESENTATION | 41 |
3 LEVELS OF REPRESENTATION | 61 |
4 PROCESSINGSPATIAL DESCRIPTIONS IN FICTION | 87 |
5 VIOLATIONS OF CONSENSUS REALITY | 123 |
6 TOWARDS A MODEL OF LITERARY COMPREHENSION | 141 |
REFERENCES | 173 |
THE SIX TEXTS USED IN EXPERIMENTS 1 AND 2 | 183 |
THE TWO EXPERIMENTAL TEXTS USED IN EXPERIMENT 4 | 186 |
187 | |
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Common terms and phrases
accuracy scores analysis ANOVA Assumption bottom-up Chapter cognitive psychology cognitive science coherence comprehension process consensus reality construction context control system convention critical sentences Dijk and Kintsch ecological validity empirical Experiment 3a experimental texts factors focused fragments genre goal Graesser Harry Mulisch instruction interaction interpretation Johnson-Laird language LCCS linguistic literary comprehension literary readers literary texts literary theory literature LP condition LP subjects mean memory mental mental model Meutsch model group narratologists newspaper normal group pilot study plausible poetic police pragmatic model predicted present procedural knowledge propositions read the text reading rate referential relatively responses role Rumelhart Schmalhofer and Glavanov semantic significant situation model situational representation spatial descriptions spatial information spatial models spatial representations specific story strategies style group suggests surface representation surface structure text comprehension textbase representation textual information tion top-down verbatim violations of consensus William Gass words world knowledge