The popularity of literary biographies and the importance publishers place on author publicity materials suggest the concept of an author’s creative intentions is important to readers’ appreciation of literary works. However, the question of how this kind of contextual information informs literary interpretation is contentious. One area of dispute concerns the extent to which readers’ constructions of an author’s creative intentions are text-centred and therefore can adequately be understood by linguistic evidence alone. The current study shows how the relationship between linguistic and contextual factors in readers’ constructions of an author’s creative intentions may be investigated empirically. We use eye-tracking to determine whether readers’ responses to textual features (changes to lexis and punctuation) are affected by prior, extra-textual prompts concerning information about an author’s creative intentions. We showed participants pairs of sentences from Oscar Wilde and Henry James while monitoring their eye movements. The first sentence was followed by a prompt denoting a different attribution (Authorial, Editorial/Publisher and Typographic) for the change that, if present, would appear in the second sentence. After reading the second sentence, participants were asked whether they had detected a change and, if so, to describe it. If the concept of an author’s creative intentions is implicated in literary reading this should influence participants’ reading behaviour and ability to accurately report a change based on the prompt. The findings showed that readers’ noticing of textual variants was sensitive to the prior prompt about its authorship, in the sense of producing an effect on attention and re-reading times. But they also showed that these effects did not follow the pattern predicted of them, based on prior assumptions about readers’ cultures. This last finding points to the importance, as well as the challenges, of further investigating the role of contextual information in readers’ constructions of an author’s creative intentions.

文学传记的流行以及出版商在作者宣传材料上的重视程度表明，作者创作意图的概念对于读者欣赏文学作品至关重要。但是，这种上下文信息如何促进文学解释的问题是有争议的。一个争议领域涉及读者对作者的创作意图的建构在多大程度上以文本为中心，因此仅凭语言证据就可以充分理解。当前的研究表明，如何从经验上研究读者对作者的创作意图的建构中的语言和语境因素之间的关系。我们使用眼动追踪来确定读者对文本特征（词汇变化和标点符号的更改）的反应是否受先前的，有关作者创作意图的信息的文字外提示。我们向参与者展示了奥斯卡·王尔德（Oscar Wilde）和亨利·詹姆斯（Henry James）的成对句子，同时监控了他们的眼睛运动。在第一句之后，提示提示更改的不同出处（作者，社论/出版者和印刷者），如果存在，将出现在第二句中。阅读第二句话后，询问参与者是否发现了变化，如果有变化，请描述变化。如果在文学阅读中牵涉到作者的创造性意图的概念，这将影响参与者的阅读行为以及根据提示准确报告变化的能力。调查结果表明，读者对文本变体的注意是从某种意义上讲，对注意力和重读时间有影响，因此对事先关于作者身份的提示敏感。但是他们还表明，根据先前对读者文化的假设，这些影响并未遵循他们所预测的模式。最后的发现指出了进一步调查上下文信息在读者对作者的创作意图的建构中的作用以及所面临的挑战。