TY - JOUR

T1 - What the eyes reveal about (reading) poetry

AU - Menninghaus, Winfried

AU - Wallot, Sebastian

N1 - We thank Christine Knoop for the exemplification of the relevant poem modifications with an English poem, as well as Claudia Lehr and Freya Materne for their help with the data collection. Sebastian Wallot acknowledges funding from the Heisenberg programme of the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG), grant number 442405852.

PY - 2021/4/1

Y1 - 2021/4/1

N2 - This study investigated how rhyme and meter affect eye movements and subjective aesthetic evaluations while reading poems. Earlier findings suggest that the effects might include prosodic predictability-driven cognitive and affective rewards from increased processing fluency (Blohm, Wagner, Schlesewsky and Menninghaus, 2018, McGlone and Tofighbakhsh, 2000), but also semantic and syntactic disfluency, as rhyme and meter are often implemented at the expense of unusual word forms and word order (Menninghaus et al., 2015, Wallot and Menninghaus, 2018). This study set out to investigate the extent to which eye movements might reveal not only distinct effects of fluency and disfluency at the same time, but potentially also hedonic responses that are associated with longer rather than shorter self-motivated exposure, in line with the hypothesis of “savoring” (Frijda and Sundararajan, 2007). The results reveal several fluency-enhancing effects of rhyme and meter on reading times for more global features of the poems, but also increased disfluency effects on gaze durations for some more local features of the poems. Moreover, some of the latter effects are readily interpretable in terms of the savoring hypothesis. Eye movement characteristics that were predictive of higher aesthetic evaluation—irrespective of the presence or absence of rhyme and meter—similarly resulted in increased fluency, disfluency, and savoring effects. Our study thus reveals, for the first time, a complex picture of effects that co-occur while reading poetic prosody, based on analyzing different dimensions of a single psychophysiological variable, namely, eye movements.

AB - This study investigated how rhyme and meter affect eye movements and subjective aesthetic evaluations while reading poems. Earlier findings suggest that the effects might include prosodic predictability-driven cognitive and affective rewards from increased processing fluency (Blohm, Wagner, Schlesewsky and Menninghaus, 2018, McGlone and Tofighbakhsh, 2000), but also semantic and syntactic disfluency, as rhyme and meter are often implemented at the expense of unusual word forms and word order (Menninghaus et al., 2015, Wallot and Menninghaus, 2018). This study set out to investigate the extent to which eye movements might reveal not only distinct effects of fluency and disfluency at the same time, but potentially also hedonic responses that are associated with longer rather than shorter self-motivated exposure, in line with the hypothesis of “savoring” (Frijda and Sundararajan, 2007). The results reveal several fluency-enhancing effects of rhyme and meter on reading times for more global features of the poems, but also increased disfluency effects on gaze durations for some more local features of the poems. Moreover, some of the latter effects are readily interpretable in terms of the savoring hypothesis. Eye movement characteristics that were predictive of higher aesthetic evaluation—irrespective of the presence or absence of rhyme and meter—similarly resulted in increased fluency, disfluency, and savoring effects. Our study thus reveals, for the first time, a complex picture of effects that co-occur while reading poetic prosody, based on analyzing different dimensions of a single psychophysiological variable, namely, eye movements.

KW - Aesthetic evaluation

KW - Eye tracking

KW - Meter

KW - Poetry

KW - Rhyme

KW - Psychology

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85098082269&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1016/j.poetic.2020.101526

DO - 10.1016/j.poetic.2020.101526

M3 - Journal articles

AN - SCOPUS:85098082269

VL - 85

JO - Poetics

JF - Poetics

SN - 0304-422X

M1 - 101526

ER -