ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces psycholinguistic approaches to understanding how readers process the language of literary texts, with the aim of explaining how this methodology can complement other, more familiar literary linguistic methods, including those used in some elements of digital humanities research. We give a description of the range of psycholinguistic tools available, including the application of technologies such as EEG, fMRI and eye tracking, and explain the kinds of questions about literariness that they can be applied to, as well as the challenges they pose. We also discuss some recent research in this field, including the use (by the authors) of eye-tracking technology to resolve critical debates in text editing. We begin, however, with a brief discussion of some of the limitations of the explanations of literariness offered by literary stylistics to put into context the novelty and value of psycholinguistic investigations of literature and to explain why the framework made available through psycholinguistics may better answer the demands for objectivity and rigour that have been claimed for linguistic approaches to literariness in general, including those using digital technology, such as the application to literary texts of corpus linguistic tools.
