Mobile phones are reportedly the most rapidly expanding e-reading device worldwide. However, the embodied, cognitive and affective implications of smartphone-supported fiction reading for leisure (m-reading) have yet to be investigated empirically. Revisiting the theoretical work of digitization scholar Anne Mangen, we argue that the digital reading experience is not only contingent on patterns of embodied reader–device interaction (Mangen, 2008 and later) but also embedded in the immediate environment and broader situational context. We call this the situation constraint. Its application to Mangen’s general framework enables us to identify four novel research areas, wherein m-reading should be investigated with regard to its unique affordances. The areas are reader–device affectivity, situated embodiment, attention training and long-term immersion.

Although personal relevance is key to sustaining an audience’s interest in any given narrative, it has received little systematic attention in scholarship to date. Across centuries and media, adaptations have been used extensively to bring temporally or geographically distant narratives “closer” to the recipient under the assumption that their impact will increase. In this article, we review experimental and other empirical evidence on narrative processing in order to unravel which types of personal relevance are more likely to be impactful than others, which types of impact (e.g., aesthetic, therapeutic, persuasive) they have been found to generate, and where their power becomes excessive or outright detrimental to reader experience. Together, the evidence suggests that narratives are read through the lens of the reader’s self-schema independently of genre, although certain groups of readers, especially in certain situations, may experience personal relevance and related effects more strongly than others. The literature further suggests that large-scale similarities between reader and character (e.g., gender) may not per se be enough for relevance effects to arise and that emotional valence has a role to play in the process alongside thematic saliency.

What do we know about the particular mental state of readers absorbed in literature? Researchers, educators and the public alike worry about its frailty and importance for sustainable society development, but its nature remains largely unknown. This talk will present a critical argument on how the reading consciousness tends to be understood in education. I will tackle three pervasive ideas: 1) the idea that the reader’s consciousness is a container of sorts; 2) the idea that the reader’s consciousness should exclude stimuli from one’s immediate environment; and especially 3) the idea that readers should abstract their personal concerns away when learning to read literature. The talk will draw on my research in literary reader response, embodied cognition, and reading behaviour across multiple countries and contexts, ranging from highly skilled adult readers to pupils in primary classrooms.

This talk will have two parts. Firstly, I will offer an outlook on literary narrative as an interface for activating and developing the reader’s tacit, embodied knowledge. Having engaged in theoretical and empirical research on the embodied and situated facets of reading for about a decade, I will especially focus on sensorimotor mental imagery – how it is supported by textual features, the environment where we read, and the reader’s personal situation more generally. Secondly, I will look at the affordances of different kinds of literature for interpersonal sharing. I will propose that some literary texts are more “tacit” in their makeup than others and that this has consequences for how our experiences of them are shared in everyday conversation and other social interactions, including educational practice. I will argue for the benefits of sharing tacit text experience in literary learning across educational tiers, and include a practical example of how this may be done.

Social sharing is a known prerequisite to fostering a love of reading and literature, both in the home and in formal educational settings. In this context, current research and discourse tend to emphasize the importance of book talk. Introducing its various forms in formal education, however, we walk a thin line between enriching individual students’ literary experiences and spoiling some of the more intimate aesthetic effects for them by the very act of talking and analyzing. Referring to findings from varied disciplines as well as to practical examples, this paper will make a case for the distinct forms and gratifications of sheer sharing, that is, of having a text in common but not talking about it. I will argue that sheer sharing can be just as formative to literacy as book talk proper, and that while certain types of literature thrive on purposeful book talk, others may in fact exert more power if they are shared tacitly. The mechanisms in focus here are readers’ mental imagery and experiences of personal resonance.

This article reports key findings from a quantitative online survey of everyday reading practices (N = 277) that targeted library professionals and students enrolled in an Information Science program in Denmark. The survey derived its rationale from the current upsurge in reading on smartphones but was constructed so as to give a comprehensive overview of all devices used for reading, as well as to map how these devices combine in respondents' reading behaviour with specific text genres and physical environments. The data documents a highly diversified reading ecology where most genres are read on most devices and where readers' choices and preferences vary with gender, age, and life situation. The clearest patterns emerge among female respondents (N = 221; M age = 39; range 19-65) who fall into distinct reader/user groups according to age. Most importantly, we found the variety of digital devices used for reading to increase rather than decrease with age, contrary tocommon assumptions. Meanwhile, the youngest of the female respondents seem to read in the greatest variety of environments, and to make the least use of printed reading materials.

The shift from print to screen has bodily effects on how we read. We distinguish two dimensions of embodied reading: the spatio-temporal and the imaginary. The former relates to what the body does during the act of reading and the latter relates to the role of the body in the imagined scenarios we create from what we read. At the level of neurons, these two dimensions are related to how we make sense of the world. From this perspective, we explain how the bodily activity of reading changes from print to screen. Our focus is on the decreased material anchoring of memories.

This article presents the design, methodology, and materials of an inter-Nordic, empirical study of literary reading among students in teacher education, in which relations between literary style and experiential aspects of literary reading (e.g. empathy and transportation) were assessed empirically. The primary aim of the article is to introduce paradigms and measures from interdisciplinary empirical research on literary reading which is less known in a Nordic context but which is rapidly gaining momentum internationally. The participants in the study read Katherine Mansfield's short story "The Fly" (1922) in the original version versus in a manipulated version in which typical features of literariness (e.g. metaphors and similes) were removed. Combining quantitative measures of empathy, appreciation of literature, and aspects of reading engagement with qualitative methods, the aim is to probe deeper into readers' subjective reading experience.

Word frequency is one of the most robust factors in the literature on word processing, based on the lexical corpus of a language. However, different sources might be used in order to determine the actual frequency of each word. Recent research has determined frequencies based on movie subtitles, Twitter, blog posts, or newspapers. In this paper, we examine a determination of these frequencies based on the World Wide Web. For this purpose, a Python script was developed to obtain frequencies of a word through online search results. These frequencies were employed to estimate lexical decision times in comparison to the traditional frequencies in a lexical decision task. It was found that the Google frequencies predict reaction times comparably to the traditional frequencies. Still, the explained variance was higher for the traditional database.