TY - JOUR

T1 - Ambiguity effects of rhyme and meter

AU - Wallot, Sebastian

AU - Menninghaus, Winfried

PY - 2018/12/1

Y1 - 2018/12/1

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

KW - Psychology

KW - Ambiguity

KW - Comprehension

KW - Meter

KW - Parallelism

KW - Rhyme

KW - Empirical education research

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85045704836&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1037/xlm0000557

DO - 10.1037/xlm0000557

M3 - Journal articles

C2 - 29683711

AN - SCOPUS:85045704836

VL - 44

SP - 1947

EP - 1954

JO - Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition

JF - Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition

SN - 0278-7393

IS - 12

ER -