Linguistic information can be conveyed in the form of speech and written text, but it is the content of the message that is ultimately essential for higher-level processes in language comprehension, such as making inferences and associations between text information and knowledge about the world. Linguistically, inference is the shovel that allows receivers to dig meaning out from the text with...

Previous studies have suggested that fiction book reading has a stronger positive effect on vocabulary development than nonfiction. In this study, we examined this phenomenon in terms of word appearance information in fiction (story texts), nonfiction (explanation texts), and web text using latent semantic analysis (LSA). In a human experiment with Japanese undergraduates, we replicated fiction...

Although past research has explored the association between media of many forms (e.g., TV, music, advertising) and sexual socialization, books are 1 form of media that has largely been ignored with respect to this topic. The current study examined the relationship between lifetime exposure to different genres of text and sexual attitudes, including gender role stereotyping and sexual conservati...

This paper describes a strategy for automatically converting fiction text into 3D animations. It assumes the existence of fiction text annotated with avatar, object, setting, transition and relation annotations, and presents a transformation process that converts annotated text into quantified constraint systems, the solutions to which are used in the population of 3D environments. Constraint s...

Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is a futuristic, science fiction novel that chronicles the colonization of Mars by humans, projecting the United States’ colonial and immigrant past on to a symbolic future. Bradbury’s use of language is mostly picturesque and sensory. The present paper applies a text-oriented analysis of stylistic elements that construct meaning in the text and evoke the n...

This paper describes a co-creative text generation system applied within a science fiction setting to be used by an established novelist. The project was initiated as part of The Dutch Book Week, and the generated text will be published within a volume of science fiction stories. We explore the ramifications of applying Natural Language Generation within a cocreative process, and examine where ...

This paper focuses on fiction electronic books and their usability. Two complementary studies were drawn together in order to investigate whether fiction e-books can successfully become part of people’s reading habits: the Visual Book project, which found that electronic texts which closely resemble their paper counterparts in terms of visual components such as size, quality and design were rec...