Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

his paper presents a psychological investigation of the informal reasoning of literary experts and students as they describe a fictional narrative. The literary situation is viewed as a communicative relation between readers and writers mediated by written text. This investigation used a task of text description and applied an explicit two-stage cognitive model of literary communication to analyze the readers' verbal protocols in terms of discursive patterns and reasoning strategies. Findings suggest that the model of the communicative context which literary experts construct for their reading is instrumental in their reasoning about the text. Students it seems are ambivalent about the author?text relationship