Summary of themes.

A perennial topic of research on giftedness has been individuals’ perceptions of and attitudes towards giftedness, the gifted, and gifted education. Although giftedness is a culturally constructed concept, most examination of the term’s meanings and implications has used reactive measures (i.e., surveys) to tap respondents’ giftedness-related perceptions and attitudes within the context of formal education. To provide a better understanding of the cultural meanings associated with giftedness—the term’s cultural framing—we investigated the depiction of giftedness within a professional cultural product removed from education, namely, a large corpus of US fictional texts. We examined patterns of word usage in the vicinity of the term gift*, when used in the dictionary senses related to giftedness, in a large corpus of US fictional texts of recent decades, consisting of 485,179 text samples and 1,002,889,754 word tokens. Via inductive methods of quantitative text analysis, we explored themes occurring in the vicinity of gift*; and with an existing lookup dictionary, we assessed deductively the overall emotional valance of the writing near gift*. Our investigation revealed ways in which the literary exploration of giftedness coheres with and distinguishes itself from the outlooks on giftedness noted for survey-based research in education settings. In fictional texts, giftedness evinces special associations with humanities domains and beauty and, on balance, correlates positively with emotionally positive words.资优（giftedness）研究的一项长期性议题，始终聚焦个体对资优、资优群体及资优教育的认知与态度。尽管资优是一种文化建构的概念，但现有针对该术语内涵与外延的研究，多采用反应式测量手段（即问卷调查），在正规教育场景中测度受访者关于资优的认知与态度。为更深入理解资优所关联的文化内涵——即该术语的文化建构框架——本研究脱离教育场景，考察专业文化产品中对资优的刻画，具体为美国近代虚构文本大型语料库。本研究针对该语料库中以词典中与资优相关义项使用的`gift*`（通配符指代该词的各类屈折形式），分析其周边语境的词汇使用模式；该语料库收录近数十年美国虚构文本，共计485,179个文本样本与1,002,889,754个词元（Token）。本研究通过定量文本分析的归纳方法，探究`gift*`周边文本所承载的主题；同时借助现有通用词典，演绎评估`gift*`周边文本的整体情感效价。本研究结果表明，文学领域对资优的刻画，既与教育场景中基于问卷调查的资优研究视角存在契合之处，也展现出独特的差异。在虚构文本中，资优展现出与人文学科领域及美学特质的特殊关联，且整体上与情感积极词汇呈正相关。