Ambiguity effects of rhyme and meter

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Previous research has shown that rhyme and meter-although enhancing prosodic processing ease and memorability-also tend to make semantic processing more demanding. Using a set of rhymed and metered proverbs, as well as nonrhymed and nonmetered versions of these proverbs, the present study reveals this hitherto unspecified difficulty of comprehension to be specifically driven by perceived ambiguity. Roman Jakobson was the 1st to propose this hypothesis, in 1960. He suggested that "ambiguity is an intrinsic, inalienable feature" of "parallelistic" diction of which the combination of rhyme and meter is a pronounced example. Our results show that ambiguity indeed explains a substantial portion of the rhyme- and meter-driven difficulty of comprehension. Longer word-reading times differentially reflected ratings for ambiguity and comprehension difficulty. However, the ambiguity effect is not "inalienable." Rather, many rhymed and metered sentences turned out to be low in ambiguity.

Original languageEnglish
JournalJournal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition
Volume44
Issue number12
Pages (from-to)1947-1954
Number of pages8
ISSN0278-7393
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 01.12.2018
Externally publishedYes

DOI

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