The Reader in the Text: The Construction of Literary Characters

When we read the description of a character, we receive explicit information and construct a semantic representation of his/her aspect and personality. This constructive process also involves inferential processes based on the elaboration of explicit information. In this paper we examined the first introduction of four female characters in Italian novels. When readers reported information that was not given in the texts, we had evidence of their constructive processes based on their inferences and world knowledge. In our study readers tended to concretize traits that were not explicitly stated in the text, with high values of the Gini index, showing different concretizations in different readers. This tendency was quite pervasive among readers, regardless of gender, academic education and interest in the text read; such constructive process seems to be intrinsic to the act of reading itself.