The role of linguistic prosody in the responses to recited poetry
Svetlana Postarnak | University of Porto
São Luís Castro | University of Porto
Susana Silva | University of Porto
Psychological studies of poetry have focused on the responses to written text, and little is known on how choices
made by reciters affect listeners’ responses. We hypothesized that syntax-compatible prosodic cues – pauses and pitch breaks –
would increase preference by increasing comprehension. Participants rated different declamations of the same poem for preference
and comprehension. The match between syntactic boundaries and linguistic prosody cues was quantified in each version, and then we
tested how this match predicted listeners’ responses. Unlike our predictions, linguistic prosody had opposite effects on
comprehension vs. preference: Comprehension was enhanced by using both sentence pauses and clause pitch breaks, while avoiding
clause pauses. When controlling for comprehension, preference was enhanced by clause pauses but hampered by clause breaks and
sentence pauses. Results are consistent with the possibility that listeners enjoyed losing track of syntactic boundaries, in line
with the idea that deviation may lead to pleasure.
Keywords: poetry, linguistic prosody, comprehension, preference, aesthetics, syntactic hierarchy
Article outline
- Method
- Participants
- Stimuli
- Procedure
- Statistical analysis
- Results
- 1.Effects of linguistic prosody on comprehension
- 2.Effects of linguistic prosody on preference
- 3.Effects of linguistic prosody and comprehension on preference
- 4.Effect of general acoustic cues on preference
- Discussion
- Supplementary materials
- Data availability statement
-
References
Published online: 19 March 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/ssol.19019.pos
https://doi.org/10.1075/ssol.19019.pos
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