as evidence that there was a special literary register, which was called, also after the Russian Formalists, 'literariness' (literaturnost'). Evidence Supporting Foregrounding Theory The attempt to support foregrounding theory, based on real reader responses, started with Willie Van Peer in 1986, and since then, many studies have validated foregrounding theory's predictions. In 1994 Miall and Kuiken had participants read three short stories one sentence after the other – and rank each sentence for strikingness and affect. Sentences that had more foregrounding devices were found to be judged by readers as more striking, more emotional, and they also lead to slower reading times. These findings were independent of the reader previous experience with reading literature, but other experiments found foregrounding effects that seem to be connected to experience. Some evidence suggest there is a difference between experienced and inexperienced readers in second readings of a literary text that is rich with foregrounding devices: For experienced readers there is an improvement in evaluation between first and second readings. This effect was initially found by Dixon, Bortolussi, Twilley and Leung in 1993 for the story Emma Zunz by Jorge Luis Borges, and was later found by Hakemulder and his colleagues for other texts as well. However, recent replication attempts by Kuijpers and Hakemulder did not get the same results. They found that the main reason for an improvement in evaluation between readings was a better understanding of the story. Another line of research suggests that experience affects the reader tendency to engage foregrounding. In an experiment that combines eye tracking and retrospective think aloud interviews Harash found that when inexperienced readers encounter a challenging stylistic device they are more prone to use shallow processing and not to start a foregrounding process, and that experienced readers have a higher tendency both to start a foregrounding process and to finish it successfully. Foregrounding also appears to play some role in increasing empathic understanding for people in similar situations as the characters in a story they just read. Koopman gave subjects to read 1 of 3 versions of an excerpt from a literary novel about the loss of a child, the original version, a manipulated version “without imagery” and a version “without foregrounding.” Results showed that readers who had read the “original” version showed higher empathy for people who are grieving than those who had read the version “without foregrounding.” Example For example, the last line