Why do we perceive bass voices as
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 165.190.89.176 on Wed, 08 Jul 2015 00:55:37 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Abstract In this essay I provide a comprehensive cognitive view of rhyme, one of the most powerful resources of poetic language. Readers and critics have strong intuitions on the matter of rhyme but find it difficult systematically to address its manifestations and the construction of its overall affect in the poetic passage. Hence critics all too frequently discuss rhymes impressionistically, in sporadic, ad hoc semantic analyses, and rely on readers to work out how these account for a poem's perceived affect(s). At other times critics ground their arguments in intertextuality, recasting rhyme as an enigma displaced from one text to another. Here I attempt to uncover the sources of possible affects of rhyme, suggesting critical tools for addressing it in a meaningful way in the hope of systematically relating its affects to its structure. Speech sounds are abstract categories, from which rich precategorical sensory information is typically stripped away. Nevertheless, some of this information does reach the cognitive system, reverberating briefly in short-term memory and facilitating, by way of certain cognitive tasks, the processing of verbal material. Rhyme exploits and enhances this sensory information. There is some experimental evidence that memory traces of two words that appear consecutively, that is, spread out in time, may be fused and perceived as if they were simultaneously present. Basing some of my findings on adaptations of gestalt psychology, I suggest that similar processes may occur in the interaction between phonetic categories and the underlying acoustic information, enhancing them or toning them down. Further, I consider the possible interaction of semantic or thematic features with acoustic information underlying speech sounds, as well as some conditions that maximize our tendency to respond to groups of individual stimuli as unified "percepts," which may account for the perceived qualities regularly associated with certain rhyme patterns, and I examine the relatively rare dactylic rhyme in an attempt to account for some contradictions regularly ascribed to it. PoeticsToday 17:1 (Spring 1996). Copyright ? 1996 by The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. CCC 0333-5372/95/$2.50. This content downloaded from 165.190.89.176 on Wed, 08 Jul 2015 00:55:37 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Poetics Today 17:1One of the most fascinating things that can happen to a researcher is to discover that his pieces of research, originally independent from one another, have begun to cohere into a field of research. My own work, which be...
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