On the Relation between the General Affective Meaning and the Basic Sublexical, Lexical, and Inter-lexical Features of Poetic Texts—A Case Study Using 57 Poems of H. M. Enzensberger

Ullrich, Susann; Aryani, Arash; Kraxenberger, Maria; Jacobs, Arthur; Conrad, Markus

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.02073

Cited by 69 publications

(56 citation statements)

References 67 publications

(121 reference statements)

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“…Our findings indicate that manipulating the ease of processing at early levels of reading (via font readability) can influence the aesthetic appreciation of poems. This evidence lines up with previous literature showing effects of font readability on processing [17]; (see [9] for overview), and adds font readability to a list of features influencing language reception [2][3][4][5][6][7]31,38,39]. An interesting issue for follow-up studies would be to investigate the effect of written (e.g.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 86%

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Is less readable liked better? The case of font readability in poetry appreciation

Gao¹,

Dera²,

Nijhof³

et al. 2019

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Previous research shows conflicting findings for the effect of font readability on comprehension and memory for language. It has been found that - perhaps counterintuitively – a hard to read font can be beneficial for language comprehension, especially for more difficult language. Here we test how font readability influences the subjective experience of poetry reading. In three experiments we tested the influence of poem difficulty and font readability on the subjective experience of poems. We specifically predicted that font readability would have opposite effects on the subjective experience of easy versus difficult poems. Participants read poems which could be more or less difficult in terms of conceptual or structural aspects, and which were presented in a font that was either easy or more difficult to read. Participants read existing poems and subsequently rated their subjective experience (overall liking, perceived flow of the poem, perceived topic clarity, and perceived structure). In line with previous literature we observed a Poem Difficulty x Font Readability interaction effect for subjective measures of poetry reading. We found that participants rated easy poems as less nice when they were presented in a hard to read font, as compared to when presented in an easy to read font. Despite the presence of the interaction effect, we did not observe the predicted opposite effect for more difficult poems. We conclude that font readability can influence reading of easy and more difficult poems differentially, with strongest effects for easy poems.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 86%

“…font) or phonological form on the perceived emotional content of the poems. Several lines of work indicate that the perceived emotional content of a poem is at least partially explained by the phonological and / or prosodic content of poems [31,[40][41][42][43][44][45].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is less readable liked better? The case of font readability in poetry appreciation

Gao¹,

Dera²,

Nijhof³

et al. 2019

Preprint

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show abstract

“…Important cognitive subprocesses are inferences for bridging successive events/situations, the use of background knowledge and discourse context, and pragmatic interpretations. Crucial affective subprocesses are personal experience/resonance and knowledge about atmospheres and moods conveyed, for example, by a poetic text, and so-called mood empathy (Aryani, Kraxenberger, Ullrich, Jacobs, & Conrad, 2016;Gittel et al, 2016;Hogan, 2010Hogan, , 2014Jacobs et al, 2016a;Lüdtke, Meyer-Sickendieck, & Jacobs, 2014;Oatley, 1999;Ullrich, Aryani, Kraxenberger, Jacobs & Conrad, 2017).…”

Section: Inference and Situation Model Buildingmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Fictive Brain: Neurocognitive Correlates of Engagement in Literature

Jacobs

Willems

2018

Review of General Psychology

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Fiction is vital to our being. Many people enjoy engaging with fiction every day. Here we focus on literary reading as 1 instance of fiction consumption from a cognitive neuroscience perspective. The brain processes which play a role in the mental construction of fiction worlds and the related engagement with fictional characters, remain largely unknown. The authors discuss the neurocognitive poetics model (Jacobs, 2015a) of literary reading specifying the likely neuronal correlates of several key processes in literary reading, namely inference and situation model building, immersion, mental simulation and imagery, figurative language and style, and the issue of distinguishing fact from fiction. An overview of recent work on these key processes is followed by a discussion of methodological challenges in studying the brain bases of fiction processing.

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“…Poetry is probably the best example of a sound meaning interaction: while it is inherently concerned with the expression and elicitation of emotions [5,56,87,88], it is deeply rooted at the perceptual level in the domain of sound [5,[89][90][91]. Indeed, poetry has always artfully deployed sound patterns to shape order, to create a new layer of meaning, and to emphasize the affective meaning in a text.…”

Section: Practical Applicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Indeed, poetry has always artfully deployed sound patterns to shape order, to create a new layer of meaning, and to emphasize the affective meaning in a text. With the present study we provide a complementary method to previous attempts for analyzing poetic texts at the sublexical level [55,56,[90][91][92][93][94], and for further examination of the influence of sound structure on affective and aesthetic reactions to verbal material intended to elicit a certain emotional impact in readers, such as advertisements, political speeches or manifests.…”

Section: Practical Applicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why ‘piss’ is ruder than ‘pee’? The role of sound in affective meaning making

Aryani¹,

Conrad²,

Schmidtke³

et al. 2018

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Most language users agree that some words sound harsh (e.g. grotesque) whereas others sound soft and pleasing (e.g. lagoon). While this prominent feature of human language has always been creatively deployed in art and poetry, it is still largely unknown whether the sound of a word in itself makes any contribution to the word’s meaning as perceived and interpreted by the listener. In a large-scale lexicon analysis, we focused on the affective substrates of words’ meaning (i.e. affective meaning) and words’ sound (i.e. affective sound); both being measured on a two-dimensional space of valence (ranging from pleasant to unpleasant) and arousal (ranging from calm to excited). We tested the hypothesis that the sound of a word possesses affective iconic characteristics that can implicitly influence listeners when evaluating the affective meaning of that word. The results show that a significant portion of the variance in affective meaning ratings of printed words depends on a number of spectral and temporal acoustic features extracted from these words after converting them to their spoken form (study1). In order to test the affective nature of this effect, we independently assessed the affective sound of these words using two different methods: through direct rating (study2a), and through acoustic models that we implemented based on pseudoword materials (study2b). In line with our hypothesis, the estimated contribution of words’ sound to ratings of words’ affective meaning was indeed associated with the affective sound of these words; with a stronger effect for arousal than for valence. Further analyses revealed crucial phonetic features potentially causing the effect of sound on meaning: e.g. words with short vowels, voiceless consonants, and hissing sibilants (as in ‘piss’) feel more arousing and negative. Our findings suggest that the process of meaning making is not solely determined by arbitrary mappings between formal aspects of words and concepts they refer to. Rather, even in silent reading, words’ acoustic profiles provide affective perceptual cues that language users may implicitly use to construct words’ overall meaning.

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On the Relation between the General Affective Meaning and the Basic Sublexical, Lexical, and Inter-lexical Features of Poetic Texts—A Case Study Using 57 Poems of H. M. Enzensberger

Cited by 69 publications

References 67 publications

Is less readable liked better? The case of font readability in poetry appreciation

Is less readable liked better? The case of font readability in poetry appreciation

The Fictive Brain: Neurocognitive Correlates of Engagement in Literature

Why ‘piss’ is ruder than ‘pee’? The role of sound in affective meaning making

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