Parallelisms and deviations: two fundamentals of an aesthetics of poetic diction
Publication date
2023-12-18
Document type
Forschungsartikel
Author
Menninghaus, Winfried
Wagner, Valentin
Schindler, Ines
Knoop, Christine A.
Blohm, Stefan
Frieler, Klaus
Scharinger, Mathias
Organisational unit
Publisher
Royal Society
Series or journal
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Series B : Biological Sciences (RSTB)
ISSN
Periodical volume
379
Periodical issue
1895
Article ID
20220424
Peer-reviewed
✅
Part of the university bibliography
✅
Language
English
Abstract
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.
Description
Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0).
Version
Published version
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