Decoding eye movements in naturalistic literary reading: Text-based predictions reveal aspects of narrative and aesthetic processing.

Literary reading builds on complex processes of comprehension, aesthetic appreciation, and immersion.The interplay between text features and eye-tracked reading behavior may help distinguish these processes, which we investigated in two studies.The comparison of different models for different texts and different eyemovement measures should provide a preliminary answer to the question of whether aesthetic and immersive processing are activated simultaneously, separately, or interactively during the reading of aesthetic literature, like prosaic and poetic narratives.For that, we analyzed data from two studies, where participants read naturalistic literary texts with their eye movements being recorded.Combining the findings from both studies provided us with a broader insight into literary processes, as one of these texts contained excerpts of contemporary mainstream prose, and the other one contained excerpts of classic 19th-century poetry, but both told narratives in the stricter sense.Both naturalistic texts were unusually long, thereby allowing the unfolding of a more complete narrative.We quantified the textual potential to evoke reader experiences like emotion, low-level comprehension, aesthetic appreciation, and narrative understanding, and explored its relation to associated reading behavior like the amount of rereading or the percentage of skipped words per page.We found that surface text features are the primary predictors of reading behavior across both text types.We also found that reading speed is influenced by context-dependent features, suggesting immersive processing, whereas rereading duration is affected by emotionalizing features, indicating parallel aesthetic processing.Implications for empirical literary studies, narrative psychology, and neurolinguistics are discussed.