Aanvullen Van Ontbrekende Informatie - Over Het Lezen Van Literaire Teksten

Abstract

Linking and integrating different parts of information in texts have frequently been the object of the psychology of reading. A lot of attention has been spent on how people infer and how they supply incomplete information. Experimental research, however, mostly has been restricted to causal and final connections in short and simple informative or narrative text samples. But in longer and complexer texts of different sorts the possibilities of connections as well as the functions of concealed information may differ, demanding different kinds of reading strategies and processes. In literature the concealing of information and even discon-nectedness have become sanctioned literary techniques. The theory of literary reception as founded by Ingarden and Iser have made the "undetermined spots" ("Unbestimmtheitsstellen") one of its fundamentals and have drawn consequences from it for the reading of literary texts. In an experiment on reading expectations with different age groups between 14 and 22, it could be shown that the perception of informational connections over longer distances and that supplying missing links increased with age. The younger subjects were reading more "linearly", mostly only using the information just read. They were less able to use or modify more remote information or to anticipate later possibilities than the older subjects. This was demonstrated with a detail from one of the short stories used in the experiment. For making such findings available for teaching aims, two types of further experimental research are necessary. It must be traced which effects different variables such as the kind of the relationship between parts of the text, the form of presentation of informational parts, temporal distance, the influence of context, have on the processing of connections. Secondly methods should be designed and tested for effectuating and speeding up the development of the processing activities.