Literature and readers' empathy: A qualitative text manipulation study

Several quantitative studies (e.g. Kidd & Castano, 2013a; Djikic et al., 2013) have shown a positive correlation between literary reading and empathy. However, the literary nature of the stimuli used in these studies has not been defined at a more detailed, stylistic level. In order to explore the stylistic underpinnings of the hypothesized link between literariness and empathy, we conducted a qualitative experiment in which the degree of stylistic foregrounding was manipulated. Subjects (N = 37) read versions of Katherine Mansfield's 'The Fly', a short story rich in foregrounding, while marking striking and evocative passages of their choosing. Afterwards, they were asked to select three markings and elaborate on their experiences in writing. One group read the original story, while the other read a 'non-literary' version, produced by an established author of suspense fiction for young adults, where stylistic foregrounding was reduced. We found that the non-literary version elicited significantly more (p \u3c 0.05) explicitly empathic responses than the original story. This finding stands in contradiction to widely accepted assumptions in recent research, but can be assimilated in alternative models of literariness and affect in literary reading (e.g. Cupchik et al., 1998). We present an analysis of the data with a view to offering more than one interpretation of the observed effects of stylistic foregrounding

Interjections in late Middle English play texts : A multi-variable pragmatic approach

PhD thesis in Reading researchThis thesis aims at providing a multidisciplinary in-depth analysis of interjections in Late Middle English play texts. The starting point of the study is historical pragmatics, but it is believed that many variables must be taken into account when linguistic items from text types of long past historical eras are examined. This is particularly true of interjections, which in many ways traverse the boundary between the spoken and the written modes, and of Late Middle English play texts. On one hand, plays may belong to the text type closest to the spoken mode, yet, on the other hand, the Middle English plays include some features quite foreign to speech, e.g. versification. The study is an empirical one, and it employs both qualitative and quantitative methods in the analysis of historical interjections. It is hoped that this study can contribute something to both the fields of literature and of historical linguistics. Chapter 1 introduces the topic by discussing speech and writing, as well as historical features which one needs bear in mind when studying past stages of language. It also presents the types of drama the study explores. Chapter 2 explicates relevant theory, the research questions, and discusses definitions of both interjections and play texts. It further discusses historical pragmatics and pragmatics in, general pragmatics, and historical linguistics, including dialectology, and it presents two modern approaches applicable to the language of play texts. An overview of the literature on historical interjections is also provided. Chapter 3 discusses the multi-contextual background to interjections in Late Middle English play texts. It discusses dialect, scribal transmission, and the religious, social, and cultural history behind the mainly religious play texts providing the data for the corpus developed as part of the present study. Chapter 3 also provides collations of the few texts surviving in more than one manuscript, in order to establish whether there seems to be a pattern for how scribes treated interjection, specifically whether they treated them as meaningful words or as meaningless sounds. The problem of categorising Late Middle English play texts is also discussed. The categories commonly used to describe these texts are in the main modern conventions, and, therefore, alternative categories are suggested. Chapter 4 discusses the methodology and the selection and treatment of the data. This chapter provides a presentation of the database developed for the purposes of the present study. Questions concerning the database, its fields, and the interpretation of the data entered into it, are discussed simultaneously as the database is described. A typical entry in the database is exemplified in Table 4-1on p. 159. Chapter 5 lists the play texts with manuscript repositories and SCT numbers of the printed texts. The chapter contains descriptive information concerning date of copy, number of hands, dialect, and subgenre. Appendix 1 complements Chapter 5 by giving more detail about, for instance, dramatis personae, stage directions, and likely manner of staging. Chapter 6 discusses each interjection type qualitatively, before some promising findings are compared and discussed in greater detail towards the end of the chapter. Such findings include whether dialect can explain some of the spelling variation found in certain types of interjections, and whether certain play texts exhibit any particular patterns in their use of types and numbers of interjections. The definition of interjections is revisited in Chapter 6 in light of the empirically-based results of the analyses of the actual use of interjections in Late Middle English play texts. In Chapter 7 some selected items and findings are subjected to statistical analysis. Significance testing is applied to some results, but it is restricted to the sort of findings which can be validly tested in groups of data of rather disparate qualities. It is e.g. difficult to perform a valid significance test of the frequencies of certain interjections in dialect groups consisting of different types of material from different dates. Chapters 8 and 9 consist of short discussions and conclusions, respectively. Only the main findings are summarised in Chapter 8, and Chapter 9 discusses potential problems and suggests topics for future studies

Why digital natives need books: The myth of the digital native

This article is concerned with children’s reading development in the important years from when they begin learning to read to the age when the child reaches adequate reading comprehension to read to learn from a variety of texts on diverse subjects. Like any skill, reading skill requires relevant and extensive training. We have tended to think that children growing up in the digital era get plenty reading training from digital devices and that this is as efficient as reading books was for earlier generations. Due to this optimism, we have paid too little attention to whether extensive use of digital devices actually provide children with relevant reading training during the important years that efficient reading is developed. The author holds that book reading still has its place in education

Assessing children's reading comprehension on paper and screen: A mode-effect study

Recent meta-analyses (Delgado et al., 2018; Kong et al., 2018; Clinton, 2019) show that reading comprehension on paper is better than on screen among (young) adults. Children's screen reading comprehension, however, is underexplored. This article presents an experiment measuring the effect of reading medium on younger (10-year old) readers' comprehension, carried out in Norway in 2015. In a within-subjects design, students (n = 1139) took two comparable versions of a reading comprehension test – one on paper, and another digitally, with test version and order of medium counterbalanced. Probabilistic test theory models (two-parameter logistic (2 PL) and partial credit models) were employed for both versions of the test, allowing direct comparisons of student achievement across media. Results showed that the students in average achieved lower scores on the digital test than on the paper version. Almost a third of the students performed better on the paper test than they did on the computer test, and the negative effect of screen reading was most pronounced among high-performing girls. Scrolling and/or misplaced digital reading habits may be salient factors behind this difference, which sheds further light on children's reading performance and how this may be affected by screen technologies. Implications of these findings for education and for reading assessment are discussed.publishedVersio