Autistic Readers of Literary Narrative: A Cognitive Aesthetics Approach

本项目旨在解决以下问题：成年自闭症读者如何处理文学叙事文本？以前的自闭症研究已经广泛地探索了自闭症个体在理解和产生方面的叙事能力(Broc等人，2021年)。然而，这项研究大多只关注简单的文学叙事。总的来说，这项研究试图解决以下辅助问题：1.与神经型读者相比，自闭症读者在文学叙事处理和享受方面有哪些困难和优势？2.文学叙事文本为自闭症读者提供了哪些具体的启示？3.有没有方法提高一些自闭症患者处理和整体参与文学叙事的能力？4.这项研究产生的见解是否也能惠及其他神经分歧群体？尽管文学批评研究的是自闭症人物的虚构表征(Rodas，2018)，经验主义文学研究只关注神经典型读者(如雅各布斯，2015)。另一方面，有关自闭症患者叙事加工的研究通常依赖于小而简单的虚构叙事，通常由实验者创作，或重复使用以前的实验，以报告自闭症个体的叙事技能(Colle等人，2008年)。研究也主要集中在自闭症在叙事加工中的“缺陷”特征，而不是优势(Broc等人，2021年)。这项研究介于文学研究和认知心理学之间，旨在将自闭症和文学叙事阅读之间的关系概念化，使用相关领域的实验工作产生的数据来支持其论点。作为其理由的一部分，它还将专注于自闭症成年人(没有额外的语言或智力障碍)，因为儿童是更频繁的研究案例(例如，Ferretti等人，2018年)。采用这一理论基础将适合这项研究考虑的假定类型的自闭症读者，具有基本的识字和阅读能力。本研究将使用由非自闭症作家创作的大量叙事性文本语料库。作为自闭症研究的创新，这些文本将涵盖不同的历史和文化时期，从19世纪和20世纪的小说到当代小说。在使用这个语料库的过程中，我将分析一系列文学叙事文本特征，包括叙事风格、结构和技巧以及形式实验等方面。我将把这些特征与各种观察到的特征联系起来，这些特征通常被理解为自闭症患者比其他人更困难，包括心理理论、隐喻语言处理和想象力(Broc等人，2021年)。我还将根据最近在自闭症叙事研究中提出的建议(有关轶事证据，参见Maróthi，CSIGó和Kéri，2019)，以及自闭症研究中更广泛的尝试，以提供自闭症的积极特征并确定处理能力(Russell等人，2019年)，来探索成年自闭症读者在处理这些特征方面可能比神经典型读者具有优势的可能性。根据这一分析，我将调查文学叙事文本如何适应成年自闭症读者的处理能力，只要它们与这些困难和优势有关。我将考虑文学叙事文本是否可以通过提高叙事技能和促进自闭症和神经典型读者之间更好的社会理解来造福于成年自闭症读者(Chapple等人，2021年)。这项研究的另一个目标将是检查文学叙事加工中是否存在基于性别的差异，因为目前公认自闭症可能在女性中呈现不同的表现(Halladay等人，2)。

This project will aim to address the following question: how do adult autistic readers process literary narrative texts? Previous autism research has explored extensively the narrative abilities of autistic individuals, in both comprehension and production (Broc et al., 2021. However, much of this research has often focused only on simple, and very rarely literary, narratives.In general, this study seeks to address the following subsidiary questions:1. What difficulties and advantages do autistic readers possess in literary narrative processing and its enjoyment compared to neurotypical readers? 2. What specific affordances do literary narrative texts offer to autistic readers? 3. Are there ways of improving some autistic individuals' ability to process, and overall engage with, literary narratives?4. Can the insights generated from this study also benefit other neurodivergent communities?Whereas literary criticism has examined the fictional representation of characters with autism (Rodas, 2018), empirical literary studies have solely focused on neurotypical readers (e.g. Jacobs, 2015). Autism research surrounding narrative processing, on the other hand, has often relied upon small, simple fictional narratives, often produced by the experimenter, or reused from previous experiments, to report on the narrative skills of autistic individuals (Colle et al., 2008). Studies have also largely focused on 'deficit' characterisations of autism in narrative processing, rather than on advantages (Broc et al., 2021). Working between both literary studies and cognitive psychology, this study will aim to conceptualise the relationship between autism and literary narrative reading, using data generated from experimental work in related areas to support its arguments. As part of its rationale, it will also concentrate on autistic adults (without additional impairments in language or intellectual ability), since children are more frequently studied cases (e.g. Ferretti et al., 2018). Adopting this rationale will be appropriate for the presumed type of autistic reader this study considers, with basic levels of literacy and reading abilities. An extensive corpus of narrative literary texts produced by non-autistic writers will be used for this study. As an innovation in autism research, these texts will cover a diverse range of historical and cultural periods, spanning from nineteenth and twentieth-century fiction to contemporary fiction. In using this corpus, I will analyse a range of literary narrative text features, including, for example, aspects of narrative style, structure, and technique, and formal experimentation. I will relate these features to a variety of observed features typically understood as more difficult for autistic individuals than others, including theory of mind, metaphorical language processing, and imagination (Broc et al., 2021). I will also explore the possibility that adult autistic readers may possess advantages over neurotypical readers in processing these features, based on recent suggestions in autism narrative research (for anecdotal evidence, see Maróthi, Csigó and Kéri, 2019), and furthermore, wider attempts in autism research to provide positive characterisations of autism and identify processing strengths (Russell et al., 2019).Following from this analysis, I will investigate how literary narrative texts can be suited to the processing strengths of adult autistic readers, to the extent that they relate to these difficulties and advantages. I will consider whether literary narrative texts can benefit adult autistic readers by increasing narrative skills and facilitating better social understanding between autism and neurotypical readers (Chapple et al., 2021). An additional goal of this study will be to examine whether there are gender-based differences in literary narrative processing, since it is currently acknowledged that autism may present differently in females (Halladay et al.,2)