Abstract
This research investigated literary expertise by examining how literary experts and students in English Literature describe a complex narrative conveyed by character dialouge. Performance protocols obtained in this task, were analyzed using a model of text description based on a stratified theory of discourse processing. The model identifies semantic units in subjects' text description protocols that consist of a set of possible ‘discursive patterns’. Each discursive pattern includes a text unit being described, and a point of reference for the description, that is, a reader, author, or text perspective. Analysis of subjects' discursive patterns indicated that students closely paraphrased the text, recounting either narrative events or characters' speech, while experts relied on specific text information to support more inferential statements. Experts commented more extensively on the language used in the text, and their descriptions included references to narrative structure and functions of dialogue in the text as well as references to the author, the reader and the relationship between author and reader. Experts appear to view the text as the result of deliberate linguistic and conceptual choices made by an author, and awareness of these choices appears to have guided their descriptions of specific text structures.
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