‘Gonna get you, baby!’ A qualitative-empirical study of attentional modulation in reading a short story

IF 0.6 3区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Language and Literature Pub Date : 2023-10-17 DOI:10.1177/09639470231202261

Inge van de Ven

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引用次数: 2

Abstract

How do individual readers determine where to allocate and how to modulate attention while reading a short story? To what extent are their attentional modulations influenced by textual characteristics and personal characteristics? This study uses response data from group discussions of the short story “Where are you going, where have you been?” by Joyce Carol Oates (1966). Participants read the story in advance, color-coding words or lines to indicate different modes of attention employed and annotated the text with text-related and unrelated mind-wandering thoughts. The results show how attentional allocation is driven by textual elements as well as readers’ choices, resulting in a complex interaction of elicited and volitional attention to certain elements of the text– not just focused or distracted attention, but a “modulated” and “integrated” experience that is dynamic and personal. These modulations are also impacted by contextual factors and the reader’s personal history that impact which aspects of a text are salient and how attention is directed. The results might provide an empirical basis for, but also challenge and supplement current theories of attentional modulation in reading literature.

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“会抓到你的，宝贝!”阅读短篇小说时注意力调节的定性-实证研究

在阅读短篇小说时，个体读者如何决定将注意力分配到哪里以及如何调节注意力?他们的注意力调节在多大程度上受到文本特征和个人特征的影响?这项研究使用了小组讨论短篇故事“你要去哪里，你去过哪里?”乔伊斯·卡罗尔·奥茨(Joyce Carol Oates, 1966)著。参与者提前阅读故事，用颜色标记单词或句子，以表明所使用的不同注意力模式，并用与文本相关和不相关的走神思想注释文本。结果表明，注意力分配是如何受到文本元素和读者选择的驱动的，从而导致对文本某些元素的诱导和自愿注意的复杂互动——不仅仅是集中或分散注意力，而是一种动态和个人的“调制”和“综合”体验。这些变化还受到上下文因素和读者个人历史的影响，这些因素会影响文本的哪些方面是突出的，以及注意力如何被引导。研究结果为现有的阅读文献注意调节理论提供了实证依据，同时也对现有的阅读文献注意调节理论提出了挑战和补充。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Language and Literature Multiple-

CiteScore

1.70

自引率

14.30%

发文量

期刊介绍： Language and Literature is an invaluable international peer-reviewed journal that covers the latest research in stylistics, defined as the study of style in literary and non-literary language. We publish theoretical, empirical and experimental research that aims to make a contribution to our understanding of style and its effects on readers. Topics covered by the journal include (but are not limited to) the following: the stylistic analysis of literary and non-literary texts, cognitive approaches to text comprehension, corpus and computational stylistics, the stylistic investigation of multimodal texts, pedagogical stylistics, the reading process, software development for stylistics, and real-world applications for stylistic analysis. We welcome articles that investigate the relationship between stylistics and other areas of linguistics, such as text linguistics, sociolinguistics and translation studies. We also encourage interdisciplinary submissions that explore the connections between stylistics and such cognate subjects and disciplines as psychology, literary studies, narratology, computer science and neuroscience. Language and Literature is essential reading for academics, teachers and students working in stylistics and related areas of language and literary studies.