Sentence judgments and the grammar of poetry: Linking linguistic structure and poetic effect

Blohm, Stefan; Wagner, Valentin; Schlesewsky, Matthias

doi:10.1016/j.poetic.2018.04.005

Cited by 7 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 61 publications

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“…Note that we have not included obvious semantic or syntactic anomalies in this study. Poems (or poetic language more generally) may induce a certain tolerance towards these kinds of violations (see 13 for investigation of genre-related tolerance towards semantic and morphological anomalies in verse, and syntactic inversions, 14 ), but this is not a research question of this paper.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rhythmic subvocalization: An eye-tracking study on silent poetry reading

Beck¹,

Konieczny

2021

JEMR

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The present study investigates effects of conventionally metered and rhymed poetry on eye-movements in silent reading. Readers saw MRRL poems (i.e., metrically regular, rhymed language) in two layouts. In poem layout, verse endings coincided with line breaks. In prose layout verse endings could be mid-line. We also added metrical and rhyme anomalies. We hypothesized that silently reading MRRL results in building up auditive expectations that are based on a rhythmic “audible gestalt” and propose that rhythmicity is generated through subvocalization. Our results revealed that readers were sensitive to rhythmic-gestalt-anomalies but showed differential effects in poem and prose layouts. Metrical anomalies in particular resulted in robust reading disruptions across a variety of eye-movement measures in the poem layout and caused re-reading of the local context. Rhyme anomalies elicited stronger effects in prose layout and resulted in systematic re-reading of pre-rhymes. The presence or absence of rhythmic-gestalt-anomalies, as well as the layout manipulation, also affected reading in general. Effects of syllable number indicated a high degree of subvocalization. The overall pattern of results suggests that eye-movements reflect, and are closely aligned with, the rhythmic subvocalization of MRRL. This study introduces a two-stage approach to the analysis of long MRRL stimuli and contributes to the discussion of how the processing of rhythm in music and speech may overlap.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rhythmic subvocalization: An eye-tracking study on silent poetry reading

Beck¹,

Konieczny

2021

JEMR

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“…The contrast to Graf & Landwehr's [38] findings that some visual design features which require extra cognitive efforts support positive 'interest' effects may be explained by the difference between the aesthetic domains (spatial/visual versus temporal/language-based aesthetics). The absence of a positive effect of deviation on the 'poetic' ratings as reported by Blohm et al [27] can be attributed to the fact that, in this previous study, 'poetic' was the only rating item besides 'natural.' In this context, the word 'poetic' might have been primarily understood as a broad counterpart to a more 'natural' diction.…”

Section: Summary and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 41%

“…By contrast, the semantic environment was very different for the raters in the present study: they had to make subtle distinctions between ratings for 'poetic' and those for 'beautiful', 'vivid,' 'praegnanz,' 'interesting,' etc. Moreover, the studies by Thierry et al [28] and Blohm et al [27] targeted only one carefully controlled deviation within the confines of short single sentences, whereas our stimuli mostly included several features of deviation and were partly full-length poems.…”

Section: Summary and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Parallelisms and deviations: two fundamentals of an aesthetics of poetic diction

Menninghaus,

Wagner,

Schindler

et al. 2023

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Poetic diction routinely involves two complementary classes of features: (i) parallelisms, i.e. repetitive patterns (rhyme, metre, alliteration, etc.) that enhance the predictability of upcoming words, and (ii) poetic deviations that challenge standard expectations/predictions regarding regular word form and order. The present study investigated how these two prediction-modulating fundamentals of poetic diction affect the cognitive processing and aesthetic evaluation of poems, humoristic couplets and proverbs. We developed quantitative measures of these two groups of text features. Across the three text genres, higher deviation scores reduced both comprehensibility and aesthetic liking whereas higher parallelism scores enhanced these. The positive effects of parallelism are significantly stronger than the concurrent negative effects of the features of deviation. These results are in accord with the hypothesis that art reception involves an interplay of prediction errors and prediction error minimization, with the latter paving the way for processing fluency and aesthetic liking.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Art, aesthetics and predictive processing: theoretical and empirical perspectives’.

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“…Some investigators tried to explore the phenomenological side of reading. They have been dealing with such questions as: What are the emotional and cognitive effects of linguistic devices on readers (Blohm, Wagner, Schlesewsky, & Menninghaus, ; Carminati, Stabler, Roberts, & Fischer, ; Johansen, ; Menninghaus, Wagner, Wassiliwizky, Jacobsen, & Knoop, ; Sotirova, ; van Peer, Hakemulder, & Zyngier, )? How do the subjective dimensions of literary interpretation (Nenadić, Vejnović, & Marković, ; Vernay, ) and evaluation (Knoop, Wagner, Jacobsen, & Menninghaus, ) come to existence?…”

Section: Contemporary Debatementioning

confidence: 99%

More than just a product: Strengthening literature in sociological analysis

Váňa

2020

Sociology Compass

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Contemporary sociology of literature is predominantly shaped by the research of literary production, which approaches literary works as black boxes and subordinates them to social interactions and institutions. Even sociologists who recognize usefulness of literature for its inner quality often look at literary texts as mere passive objects to be translated into sociological discourse. In proposing a new sociology of literature, I first briefly outline the history of sociological studies of literature; second, I introduce “the state of the art” in the sociology of literature; third, I explore the relationship between sociology and literature in more general terms; and lastly, I discuss approaches and ideas with the potential to become components of a new research program, which would be a powerful alternative to the mainstream paradigms in sociological studies of literature. Such a program would make it clear that sociology can greatly benefit from cooperation with literature when sociologists are sensitive to the subtleties and (especially aesthetic) specificities of literary works.

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Sentence judgments and the grammar of poetry: Linking linguistic structure and poetic effect

Cited by 7 publications

References 61 publications

Rhythmic subvocalization: An eye-tracking study on silent poetry reading

Rhythmic subvocalization: An eye-tracking study on silent poetry reading

Parallelisms and deviations: two fundamentals of an aesthetics of poetic diction

More than just a product: Strengthening literature in sociological analysis

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