Language Lab

The ability to read is a foundational skill that enables educational achievement, access to knowledge, and meaningful participation in contemporary society. Reading - esspecially reading literary texts -  contributes to the development of reading fluency, of reading comprehension and also to the development of soscial cognition. It is suppused to support imagination and mental simulation, perspective-taking, and emotional competencies such as emotion recognition and regulation.

In our language lab, reading research focuses on key questions such as: How do readers mentally simulate story events and the emotional states of characters? Which linguistic, stylistic and narrative features evoke aesthetic and affective responses? How are processes like language comprehension, mental imagery, and emotional engagement interact? And how do individual differences—such as reading fluency, literary experience, or personal reading history—influence the reading experience?

Within the framework of neurocognitive poetics, our group aims to deepen the understanding of the dynamic interplay between text, reader, and context and how this interaction shapes the cognitive and emotional mechanisms involved in especially in literary reading. 

   

Ressources

In recent years we developed various resources for experimental research...

SLS-Berlin - Validated and standardized screening to assess reading fluency in adulthood (Lüdtke et al, 2019)

GLEAN - German list of extrapolated affective norms (Lüdtke & Hugentobler, 2023)

Ongoing Projects

CHYLSA

CHYLSA or in its original title "Advanced Sentiment Analysis for Understanding Affective-Aesthetic Responses to Literary Texts: A Computational and Experimental Psychology Approach to Children’s Literature", is an interdisciplinary project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG, SPP 2207). The project focuses on the investigation of emotions in children's and young adult literature. Its goal is to further develop existing tools for sentiment analysis (e.g., SentiArt, GLEAN) so that they better account for the specific characteristics of literary texts aimed at young readers.  The project aimes are defined by three key milestones:

• the construction of representative and balanced corpora of German children’s literature
• the domain-specific adaptation of existing sentiment analysis tools
• the experimental-psychological validations 

CHYLSA is a collaborative project between the Language Lab at Freie Universität Berlin and the Department of Book and Reading Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.

(Re-)Constructing Perspective Narrative Structures and Psychological Effects in Reading Literary Texts

Since the 'rise of the novel' in the eighteenth century and the modern subjectivization of poetry, perspectives have become an important feature of literature in general, and literature is seen as an exercise in perspectives. The proposed transdisciplinary project is primarily concerned with the different possibilities of representing a narrative world and their specific effects on readers – i.e., the impact of certain textual features on the reading process. The overall goal of this project is to explore the role of perspective cues in narrative texts through theoretical, psychological, and computer-assisted means. Three approaches – the production aspects (creative writing), the textual dimensions (narratology) and the reception aspects (empirical psychology) – are realized in three major steps, to which each discipline contribute its specific expertise: 1. A systematic review of the supposed effects of narrative perspective cues on the reading process in narratology, creative writing and empirical studies. 2. A detailed analysis of how different perspective cues are used together in literary texts, and how sequences of such patterns are dynamically processed while reading. 3. Investigations into readers’ explicit responses to narrative perspectives cues during the reading process, story recall, and text recommendations.  

This is a collaborative project between the Language Lab at Freie Universität Berlin, the Educational Psychology Group at University of Goettingen, the Department of Book and Reading Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and Contemporary German Literature at University Vienna. The project will start in 2026.

    

Finished projects

ELIT

The Empirical Study of Literature Innovative Training Network (ELIT) was an EU funded Innovative Training Network (MSCA-ITN-2019, Grant Agreement 860516) whose mission was to provide a Joint/Double Doctorate level training programme, valid throughout all Europe, on innovative approaches applied to literary reading in the digital age. This interdisciplinary programme  trained future research leaders with the capability to address the needs of improving literacy rates and mental wellbeing in European society.

The Individual Research Project hosted at Freie Universität Berlin  "Neurocognitive Poetics: Towards new integrative models and methods" aimed at developing an integrative process model of reader responses and reading experiences with ecologically valid texts and in natural reading environments. The new model should be based on previous theoretical models of neurocognitive poetics and neuroaesthetics. Model predictions will be tested combining numerically aided phenomenology with neurocognitive methods to show both its principled validity and possible limitations. The Early Stage Researcher (ERS) is Mesian Tilmatine.