TY  - JOUR
A1  - Fabb, Nigel
T1  - There is no psychological limit on the duration of metrical lines in performance : against Turner and Pöppel
T2  - International journal of literary linguistics : IJLL
N2  - Frederick Turner and Ernst Pöppel (1983) proposed that lines of metrical poetry tend to measure three seconds or less when performed aloud, and that the metrical line is fitted to a three second "auditory present" in the brain. In this paper I show that there are faults both in their original argument, and in the claims which underlie it. I present new data, based on the measurement of line durations in publicly available recorded performances of 54 metrical poems; in this corpus, lines of performed metrical verse are often longer than three seconds: 59% of the 1155 lines are longer than 3 seconds, 40% longer than 3.5 seconds and 26% longer than 4 seconds. On the basis of weaknesses in the original paper, and the new data presented here, I propose, against Turner and Pöppel, that there is no evidence that lines of verse are constrained by a time-limited psychological capacity.
KW  - Metre
KW  - performance
KW  - time
KW  - line
KW  - working memory
Y1  - 2013
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/48401
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-484011
SN  - 2194-5594
N1  - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
VL  - 2
IS  - 1
SP  - 1
EP  - 29
PB  - Johannes Gutenberg-Universität
CY  - Mainz, Germany
ER  -