Search for:. Assonance Assonance is the repetition of the same vowel sound in words near each other. Consonance Consonance is the repetition of the same consonant sounds in words near each other Alliteration Alliteration is the repetition of the same consonant sounds at the beginning of words near each other. Onomatopoeia Onomatopoeia means a word resembles the meaning sound it represents.
Rhyme Rhyme requires two or more words that repeat the same sounds.. Rhythm Rhythm, of course, is the beat—the stressed syllables in a poem. Meter Meter is the countable beat that a poet or reader can count. Also, look for alliteration, assonance, consonance, and end-rhyme. Caesuras Caesuras are a break, pause, or interruption in the line. End-Stopped Line An end-stopped line occurs like natural speech; it ends at the end of a line. Enjambment Enjambment, the opposite of the end-stopped line, does not pause at the end of a line.
The current study draws on stanzas 1 from lyrical poetry to investigate the aesthetic and emotional effects of meter and rhyme. Two aspects of poetry may contribute to the emotional responses it may elicit: its lexical content and its structural features i.
While there is substantial evidence that the valence of words can influence the way they are perceived and processed e. 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.
The idea that poetic structure influences the reception of poetry is not new. Since Greek antiquity, rhetoricians most notably Gorgias as in Aristotle, and philosophers e. Furthermore, he already emphasized that poetry reception can be linked to memory formation. This rich tradition of rhetoric and poetics has influenced literary studies on rhetoric and poetry ever since. For example, Jakobson essentially referred to these well-established concepts and further specified them in his seminal work on the processing of poetical language.
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. By contrast, some proponents of cognitive poetics e. Our study continues and deepens this approach; specifically, we suggest that the cognitive fluency-hypothesis e. As described by Jakobson , meter and rhyme are two of the most important and most characteristic features of poetry.
Not surprisingly, these two features have received much interest from literary and language researchers alike. Though being quite different in form, both features rely on a similar type of mechanism to structure poetry. They represent patterns of recurrence or similarity, i. Rhymes represent pairs of words that are phonologically identical from the last accented vowel to the end of a word e.
Besides their potential effect on aesthetic experience, they have been claimed to influence recall and comprehension of words e. For instance, several studies have shown that target words rhyming with a preceding prime word are easier to process than non-rhyming target words e. Furthermore, rhymes seem to contribute to the organization of lexico-semantic information in the mental lexicon e.
In a word recognition experiment, the authors reported that not only target words, but also the rhyming competitors were activated to a similar degree. This suggests that word cohorts with similar rhyme structure are activated in a comparable manner. In poetry, end rhyme structures a poem at the level of the verse by strongly marking the ends of single verses and hence the onset of the caesura between two verses cf. We suggest that rhyme — next to the already mentioned effects — highlights the overall metrical gestalt of a verse 2 , at least in poems of the type we used in the present experiment.
Moreover, the phonological matching constitutive of rhyme produces a pattern of recurrence between two ante-caesura-syllables of different verses, which in turn makes the higher order gestalt of stanzas more predictable and memorable.
In other words, end rhymes in metered poetry temporally structure both single verses and their configuration within the multi-verse unit of the stanza. They do so by placing additional emphasis on metrical patterning and by producing a phonological resonance between two selected words, or syllables, in the ante-caesura position, i.
Finally, since antiquity rhetoric and poetics postulate that rhetorical elaboration of whatever sort should make the message of an utterance more salient and more emotionally involving. Meter generally refers to the perception of alternating accented strong or unaccented weak syllables Selkirk, ; Port, For instance, the syllabotonic meter, which is the most common form of meter in English and German poetry, is defined both by the alternation of stressed and unstressed events within a metered foot and the number of stressed syllables in a verse line.
Whereas rhyme structures poetry in a symmetrical way at a larger time scale, meter provides an asymmetric temporal marking of poetry on a smaller time scale see Fabb, There is substantial evidence that metrical patterning in many forms of poetry is beneficial to cognitive processes e.
Regular metrical structure, for instance, is easier to remember and to reproduce than irregular metrical structure Essens and Povel, It plays a role in language acquisition e. A small number of studies e.
In summary, both rhyme and meter are associated with structuring perceptual input by drawing attention toward prosodic stimulus properties and facilitating cognitive processing. Ease of processing could result in a reduced working memory load as well as predictions of upcoming stimulus events. Furthermore, proponents of aesthetics and cognitive poetics postulate that similarity, symmetry, and other types of recursive patterning based on rhyme and metrical structure are basic features of beauty e.
Therefore, rhyme and the metrical structure of poetry should impact aesthetic liking and should also render poetry more emotionally involving. However, so far no systematic investigation has been undertaken to show how these two structural features of poetry as well as their interplay with lexical content impact the aesthetic and emotional processing of poetry 3.
We therefore set out to investigate whether there is a link between specific structural properties of poetry and aesthetic and emotional responses to it. In order to address this question, we collected a set of 60 stanzas taken from nineteenth and twentieth century German poems. On the basis of these four verse stanzas we produced highly controlled versions that differed in lexicality real words vs. Participants listened to the pre-recorded stanzas and rated them on four scales: liking aesthetic appreciation , strength of emotional response intensity , emotion perceived as represented, or expressed in the stanzas perceived emotion , and emotion actually felt while listening to the stanzas felt emotion.
If the hypotheses put forward by classical rhetoric and cognitive poetics are correct, stylistic figures such as meter and rhyme should influence aesthetic and emotion ratings. More specifically, we should expect to find higher aesthetic value ratings, higher emotional intensity ratings, higher perceived emotion, and higher felt emotions ratings for rhyming as compared to non-rhyming stanzas.
Similarly to the rhyme manipulation, we would also expect effects of meter on all four rating categories based on propositions put forward by the cognitive fluency theory.
Specifically, we would expect higher rating for metered as compared to non-metered stanzas. However, the meter manipulation, while perceived and detected by participants in a pretest, could also be perceived as less salient compared to the rhyme manipulation.
As a consequence, effects of meter in the different rating categories could be weaker. If structural features interact with lexico-semantic content of poems, this would falsify the proposition put forward by the cognitive fluency theory that structural features are important contributors to aesthetic liking and emotional responses per se. However, based on evidence from emotion research we expect lexicality to impact the emotion ratings, as it is known that the valence of a word can influence emotional responses to it e.
The aesthetic liking rating, however, should be rather unaffected, as it should only capture the stylistic quality of the stanzas. As this study is of exploratory nature, it is difficult to clearly predict potential interactions of the factors.
However, based on assumptions in cognitive poetics, both stylistic factors and semantic content should contribute to the emotional response in a perceiver. Therefore it is reasonable to assume that those ratings that are concerned with the perceived and felt emotional content of the stanzas may be specifically prone to interaction between lexicality and the stylistic factors.
Nineteen native German-speaking participants were paid to participate and signed a written informed consent following the guidelines of the Ethics committee of the University of Leipzig. Two participants were excluded from further statistical analysis due to technical problems during data collection.
The remaining 17 11 female; 19—30 years, mean The basic stimulus set contained four-verse stanzas from nineteenth and early twentieth century German poetry e. These samples usually constituted the first stanza of the respective poems. The stimuli were controlled for metrical form iambic vs. Only nouns and verbs were accepted in the rhyming position. We also excluded poems that were too well-known to control for familiarity. For each of the stanzas four different versions were constructed based on the factors METER metered vs.
The altered versions were constructed according to the following principles: the original words and word order in the stanzas were kept identical whenever possible. The non-metered versions were obtained by adding one or two syllables to each verse, e. For the non-rhyming versions, the first word of each rhyme pair was substituted.
Apart from modifying rhyme and meter, great care was taken that other stylistic features, such as metaphor and syntactical figures e. Table 1. Table 2. The pseudo-words were constructed by substituting the original consonants with different ones while keeping vowels constant. German phonotactic rules were considered to guarantee the pronounceability of the pseudo-word verses for more details on the pseudo-word construction, see Raettig and Kotz, A professional actor produced the stanza versions with natural intonation.
Each stanza was recorded several times and the best sounding recordings were subsequently chosen and normalized to 78 dB to minimize differences in intensity between the stanzas. Furthermore, separate acoustic analyses of duration, maximal pitch, minimal pitch, and mean pitch were calculated to ensure that critical parts of the different verse versions, i.
Table 3. Statistical values mean, range across the critical, final words of each line for all stimulus conditions. In order to verify and optimize the quality of the meter manipulation, a rating study was performed. Based on the results of the rating, 30 stanzas with rhyming couplets as well as 30 stanzas with alternating rhymes were selected for a final stimulus set, which showed the largest difference in the rhythmic regularity rating for the metered and non-metered versions.
Participants listened to each stanza version via headphones. They were instructed to rate the stanzas spontaneously along four dimensions: liking, intensity, perceived emotion, and felt emotion. For the liking rating, they were told to judge the overall aesthetic effect of the stanza taking into account the tonal and rhythmic properties five-point Likert-scale: 1 — very bad to 5 — very good.
For the intensity rating, participants had to assess the strength of the emotional response to the stanzas five-point Likert-scale: 1 — very weak to 5-very strong. On the perceived emotion scale participants had to indicate the emotion they perceived as represented or expressed in the stanzas five-point Likert-scale: 1 — very negative to 5 — very positive , whereas they had to rate the emotion they actually experienced while listening to the stanzas on the felt emotion scale five-point Likert-scale: 1 — very negative to 5 — very positive.
The rating took place in two sessions. In the first session, participants judged the pseudo-word versions of the stanzas poems, i. In each session the stanzas were presented in mini-blocks of six stanzas of the same type, all in all resulting in 40 mini-blocks per session. The whole rating lasted approximately 2. Each of the different ratings was subjected to a repeated-measures ANOVA with the factors lexicality real words vs.
Figure 1. The A shows the main effect of meter, whereas the B shows the main effect of rhyme. This result suggests that not only meter and rhyme, but also the lexicality of a stanza influences the strength of the emotional response to a stanza. Specifically, the emotional response to real word stanzas was stronger than that to pseudo-word stanzas.
Figure 2. The A illustrates the main effect of lexicality, the middle one B the main effect of meter, and the right one C shows the main effect of rhyme. Figure 3. The A shows the main effect of rhyme, whereas the B depicts the interaction of lexicality and meter, with the left part showing the main effect of meter for real world stanzas and the right part showing the main effect of meter for pseudo-word stanzas.
In summary, rhyming stanzas seem to be perceived more positively than non-rhyming ones. Here an imitative harmony is created to give the poem a sense of fluidity.
Consonance is the repetition of consonants in a rhyme scheme and typically occurs at the end of words ex. Generally, Consonance occurs at the end of words, Alliteration at the beginning, and Assonance takes the middle ground. Sight Rhyme is an imperfect pattern in a rhyme scheme and often uses words which have a similarity in spelling rather than sound ex. This is also sometimes called eye rhyme. Slant Rhyme occurs when the rhyme scheme is inexact, distant, or virtual.
The rhyme scheme blends and the sound matches, but imperfectly ex. This is also sometimes called pararhyme. Off-centered Rhyme occurs when the rhyme scheme is placed in an unusual position within the poem, perhaps in the middle of a line for example.
Mirror Rhyme occurs when words are used that don't exactly rhyme, but are reflections of one another ex. Sporadic Rhyme is occasional rhyme that occurs unpredictably in a poem with most of the lines being unrhymed.
Thorn Rhyme is a line that stands out because it intentionally doesn't rhyme in a poem in which most of the lines do rhyme. No Rhyme Rhyme occurs when there are no words in the English language that match a particular word to rhyme it. Some examples would be the words "orange, silver, purple, and month".
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