Anezka Kuzmicova

Charles University in Prague | CUNI · Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism

Several quantitative studies (e.g. Kidd & Castano, 2013a; Djikic et al., 2013) have shown a positive correlation between literary reading and empathy. However, the literary nature of the stimuli used in these studies has not been defined at a more detailed, stylistic level. In order to explore the stylistic underpinnings of the hypothesized link be...

Fiction, more than expository text, nurtures intimate connections between text and the reader’s life experiences. This dimension of reader response is underexplored in relation to children. Adapting methods from Empirical Literary Studies to educational research objectives, we employed the concept of ‘remindings,’ i.e. reminiscing prompted by text,...

Literacy research and practice are invigorated by evidence that stories enhance empathy and concentration. Both benefits are associated with attending to inner sensory states afforded by stories. Yet children are rarely asked about how stories, steeped as they are in characters' bodily actions, affect them in bodily terms. We have conducted a quali...

Research in the intersections of literature, media, and psychology increasingly examines the absorbing story experiences of adult readers, typically relying on quantitative self-report questionnaires. Meanwhile, little work has been done to explore how being “lost in a book” is experienced by children, despite the phenomenon’s importance for litera...

Nonfiction has long been left out of the discourse on literacy and little is known about the affective experiences that children seek when they choose to engage with facts via reading and otherwise. We have conducted an interview study in which children of diverse socioeconomic backgrounds in Czechia (N = 20, age 9–11) reflected on the world of fac...

Charles University, Prague, is offering a full-time postdoc position within Dr. Anezka Kuzmicova’s ERC-funded project WONDRE (Ways of imagining in children’s lives with information texts), starting in the autumn of 2024. Suitable for candidates from a broad range of disciplines who are interested in studying how nonfiction books but also other fact...

Experts on literature and pedagogy from a wide range of countries and traditions currently argue for including literary texts with diverse characters in the curriculum, in order to provide children with varied reading experiences and foster their outgroup empathy skills. In this article, our aim is twofold. Firstly, we contribute to the debate in q...

L1 literacy instruction in Czechia largely relies on reading anthologies, i.e., textbooks containing short excerpts of literary texts from the 19th to 21st century. Focusing on current Year 3 anthologies (N = 13), we have developed a simple, scalable and transferable analytical procedure examining what types of characters (male, female, animal, oth...

In recent years, a new cognitive research paradigm emphasising situated and bodily cognition has gained impetus. A growing number of neuroscience studies suggest that sensory-motor experiences shape the individual’s development of concepts and language use. A commonly shared explanation of these findings proposes that when we as infants are acquiri...

This article explores the (dis)comforts of reading in print vs. digital formats. We ran a qualitative study with 36 student respondents across six countries and found that reading can be uncomfortable, but that physical discomfort is sometimes the reader’s preferred choice. Based on our data we discuss how the reading device, type of text and purpo...

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 readi...

Published by CERLALC at: https://cerlalc.org/publicaciones/dosier-lectura-en-papel-vs-lectura-en-pantalla/ Spanish translation (by Laura Tibaquira) of: Schilhab, T., Balling, G., & Kuzmičová, A. (2018). Decreasing materiality from print to screen reading. Special issue ‘Reading in the digital era,’ eds. M. Kovač and A. van der Weel. First Monday 23...

Based on Kuzmičová’s (2014) phenomenological typology of narrative styles, we studied the specific contributions of mental imagery to literary reading experience and to reading behavior by combining questionnaires with eye-tracking methodology. Specifically, we focused on the two main categories in Kuzmičová’s (2014) typology, i.e., texts dominated...

This chapter revisits three common ideas about how consciousness works when we read fiction. Firstly, I contest the notion that the reading consciousness is a container of sorts, containing a circumscribed amount of textual stimulus. Secondly, I argue against the view that readers abstract their personal concerns away in reading, and that they do s...

Introduction to "The Place of the Cognitive in Literary Studies," special collection, Cogent Arts & Humanities 6 (1) (2019), eds. K. Kukkonen, A. Kuzmicova, S. Ledet Christiansen, & M. Polvinen.

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 impa...

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 over...

IzvlečekNamen: Namen prispevka je obravnavati branje kot fizično dejavnost, ki je vpisana v prostor in nosi številne sociološke konotacije. Branje analizira kot utelešeno (angl. embodied) in družbeno prakso in ugotavlja medsebojno sodoločenost teh dveh dimenzij.Metodologija/pristop: V fokusnih skupinah smo izvedli pogovore s študenti iz šestih evro...

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,...

This article presents the design, methodology and materials of an inter-Nordic 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 participants in the study read Katherine Manfield's (19...

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...

This article presents the design, methodology and materials of an inter-Nordic 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 participants in the study read Katherine Manfield’s (19...

The alleged crisis of the humanities is currently fueling renewed interest in the affective benefits of literary reading. Several quantitative studies have shown a positive correlation between literary reading and empathy. However, the literary nature of the stimuli used in these studies has not been defined at a more detailed, stylistic level. In...

The objective of this article is to review extant empirical studies of empathy in narrative reading in light of (i) contemporary literary theory, and (ii) neuroscientific studies of empathy, and to discuss how a closer interplay between neuroscience and literary studies may enhance our understanding of empathy in narrative reading. An introduction...

While language use in general is currently being explored as essentially situated in immediate physical environment, narrative reading is primarily regarded as a means of decoupling one's consciousness from the environment. In order to offer a more diversified view of narrative reading, the article distinguishes between 3 different roles the enviro...

Comparisons between audiobook listening and print reading often boil down to the fact that audiobooks impose limitations on the recipient’s continuous in-depth reflection. As a result, audiobook listening is considered a shallow alternative to reading. This chapter critically revisits the following three intuitions commonly associated with such com...

The objective of this article is twofold. In the first part, I will discuss two issues central to any theoretical inquiry into mental imagery: embodiment and consciousness. I will do so against the backdrop of second-generation cognitive science, more specifically the increasingly popular research framework of embodied cognition, and I will conside...

It is generally acknowledged that verbal auditory imagery, the reader's sense of hearing the words on a page, matters in the silent reading of poetry. Verbal auditory imagery (VAI) in the silent reading of narrative prose, on the other hand, is mostly neglected by literary and other theorists. This is a first attempt to provide a systematic theoret...

Defined as vicarious sensorimotor experiencing, mental imagery is a powerful source of aesthetic enjoyment in everyday life and, reportedly, one of the commonest things readers remember about literary narratives in the long term. Furthermore, it is positively correlated with other dimensions of reader response, most notably with emotion. Until rece...

This paper disputes the notion, endorsed by much of narrative theory, that the reading of literary narrative is functionally analogous to an act of communication, where communication stands for the transfer of thought and conceptual information. The paper offers a basic typology of the sensorimotor effects of reading, which fall outside such a narr...

Drawing on research in narrative theory and literary aesthetics, text and discourse processing, phenomenology and the experimental cognitive sciences, this paper outlines an embodied theory of presence (i.e., the reader's sense of having entered a tangible environment) in the reading of literary narrative. Contrary to common assumptions, it is argu...

In this paper, I oppose the common assumption that visual descriptions in prose fiction are imageable by virtue of perceptual mimesis. Based on introspection as well as convergent support from cognitive science and other disciplines, I argue that visual description (and the mental imagery it elicits), unlike narrative (and the mental imagery it eli...