For our Summer Semester LitAttention Colloquium, Kathy Conklin will be joining us on the 21st of May. See below for her bio and the abstract for her talk.
Seeing literariness: Eye-tracking as a window into the reading of literary texts
Bio
Kathy Conklin is Professor of Psycholinguistics in the School of English at the University of Nottingham. She is co-author of the seminal book Eye-tracking: A Guide for Applied Linguistics Research (2018, Cambridge University Press), which has been translated into Chinese (2020) and Arabic (2024).
Abstract
Eye‑tracking makes “visible” how stylistic features shape readers’ allocation of attention as they move through literary texts. Drawing on my research on Dickens and Woolf, this talk will examine how linguistic choices shape real‑time processing during reading. I will demonstrate how eye‑movement measures can be leveraged to reveal cognitive effort, providing empirical insight into readers’ processing of authentic fiction. I will also discuss the methodological challenges inherent in working with authentic literary texts.