TY  - JOUR
A1  - Obermeier, Christian
A1  - Menninghaus, Winfried
A1  - Koppenfels, Martin von
A1  - Raettig, Tim
A1  - Schmidt-Kassow, Maren
A1  - Otterbein, Sascha
A1  - Kotz, Sonja A.
T1  - Aesthetic and emotional effects of meter and rhyme in poetry
T2  - Frontiers in psychology
N2  - Metrical patterning and rhyme are frequently employed in poetry but also in infant-directed speech, play, rites, and festive events. 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. Hypotheses that postulate such effects have been advocated ever since ancient rhetoric and poetics, yet they have barely been empirically tested. More recently, in the field of cognitive poetics, these traditional assumptions have been readopted into a general cognitive framework. 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. Participants listened to stanzas that were systematically modified with regard to meter and rhyme and rated them. 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. 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. The present results are explained within the theoretical framework of cognitive fluency, which links structural features of poetry with aesthetic and emotional appraisal.
KW  - meter
KW  - rhyme
KW  - emotion
KW  - aesthetics
KW  - cognitive fluency
KW  - poetry
Y1  - 2013
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/31597
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-315971
SN  - 1664-1078
N1  - Copyright: © 2013 Obermeier, Menninghaus, von Koppenfels, Raettig, Schmidt-Kassow, Otterbein and Kotz. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and source are credited and subject to any copyright notices concerning any third-party graphics etc.
VL  - 4
IS  - 10
PB  - Frontiers Research Foundation
CY  - Lausanne
ER  -