Abstract
Fictional literary narratives, like novels often include dialogues, i.e., characters' exchange of turns using direct speech. Although conversations between characters in stories could be also summarized without any quotation of what actually has been said, dialogues are an often-used narrative mode especially in certain genres (e.g., in crime novels). It has been also assumed that dialogues and direct speech is essential for the authenticity and believability of the characters and that it is an effective way to enliven a narrative and to engage the readers. However, empirical studies has rarely explored the effect of dialogues on the readers' experiences.
We hypothesize that dialogues increase engagement (immersion, absorption) during reading together with other textual cues which can give a sense of "being there" in the fictional world for the reader. For example, embodied cues, such as references to movements (i.e., "I walked down."), postures (i.e., "I was sitting.") and bodily experiences (e.g., "I have pain.") could also lead to higher immersion. Using eye-tracking methodology, we are planning to examine eye-tracking correlates of immersion while participants read dialogues and embodied cues embedded in longer literary texts.
The study is done in collaboration between Lilla Magyari (University of Stavanger), Karin Kukkonen (ILOS, UiO) and Bruno Laeng (RITMO, UiO). The study is part of the project What do we learn from dialogues in fiction? (FictDial) which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 845343.
Biography
Lilla Magyari is associate professor at the Department of Social Studies at University of Stavanger and Marie-Curie postdoc fellow at the Norwegian Reading Center. In her research, she has studied conversational turn-taking, language predictions and comprehension using behavioral methods, electrophysiology/ MEG and eye-tracking in human adults, infants and companion animals (mini-pigs and dogs). In her most recent project, she is interested in how readers experience and process literary representations of verbal social interactions.