![]() By contrast, some proponents of cognitive poetics (e.g., Van Peer, 1990 Tsur, 2008) have made significant suggestions and have taken steps in this direction. Yet like most of traditional rhetoric and poetics, Jakobson did not try to account for the effects of poetical language in terms of general psychological mechanisms, be they primarily cognitive or affective in nature. For example, Jakobson ( 1960) essentially referred to these well-established concepts and further specified them in his seminal work on the processing of poetical language. This rich tradition of rhetoric and poetics has influenced literary studies on rhetoric and poetry ever since. Furthermore, he already emphasized that poetry reception can be linked to memory formation. For instance, Aristotle in his work “ Poetics” (1932, 1449b, 28–30) claimed that the “sweetness” of meter and sound harmony in the language of tragedy, specifically in its sung portions, is one of the reasons why we can take “pleasure” (gr. Since Greek antiquity, rhetoricians (most notably Gorgias as in Aristotle, 1926) and philosophers (e.g., Aristotle, 1932) debated how stylistic figures affect recipients. The idea that poetic structure influences the reception of poetry is not new. Attempting to link poetic structure and its potential aesthetic or emotional effects is one of the central concerns in literary studies, but more recently also in cognitive research. While there is substantial evidence that the valence of words can influence the way they are perceived and processed (e.g., Kuchinke et al., 2005 Kanske and Kotz, 2007), little is known about how certain formal features contribute to the aesthetic and emotional reception of poetry. Two aspects of poetry may contribute to the emotional responses it may elicit: its lexical content and its structural features (i.e., poetic form). The current study draws on stanzas 1 from lyrical poetry to investigate the aesthetic and emotional effects of meter and rhyme. ![]() Poetry proper is only one of the many uses of language “poeticized” or “rhetoricized” in this way. Although regular metrical patterns have been spurned in western poetry by many of the avant-garde authors of the twentieth century, recently regular meter as a stylistic feature has resurfaced even in cutting-edge poetry as a consequence of the “new orality” of movements such as “spoken word,” slam poetry, etc. The use of these “poetical” features of language can be traced back several 1000 years and is likely to predate by far the written record of human language. In infant-directed speech, play, religious, and social rites, festive events, and other social occasions, almost all cultures of the world use “special” language featuring the superimposition of metrical patterning and sound similarities of various types. The present results are explained within the theoretical framework of cognitive fluency, which links structural features of poetry with aesthetic and emotional appraisal. ![]() Together these findings clearly show that both features significantly contribute to the aesthetic and emotional perception of poetry and thus confirm assumptions about their impact put forward by cognitive poetics. Both rhyme and regular meter led to enhanced aesthetic appreciation, higher intensity in processing, and more positively perceived and felt emotions, with the latter finding being mediated by lexicality. Participants listened to stanzas that were systematically modified with regard to meter and rhyme and rated them. In the present experiment, we tested the influence of meter and rhyme as well as their interaction with lexicality in the aesthetic and emotional perception of poetry. More recently, in the field of cognitive poetics, these traditional assumptions have been readopted into a general cognitive framework. Hypotheses that postulate such effects have been advocated ever since ancient rhetoric and poetics, yet they have barely been empirically tested. Drawing on four line-stanzas from nineteenth and twentieth German poetry that feature end rhyme and regular meter, the present study tested the hypothesis that meter and rhyme have an impact on aesthetic liking, emotional involvement, and affective valence attributions. Metrical patterning and rhyme are frequently employed in poetry but also in infant-directed speech, play, rites, and festive events.
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