Mimological Reveries? Disconfirming the Hypothesis of Phono-Emotional Iconicity in Poetry

Kraxenberger, Maria

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01779

Cited by 25 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…Similarly, another study reported that native speakers rated German, Chinese, Russian, and Ukrainian poems with a relatively high frequency of nasals as sad, and poems with a high frequency of plosives as happy/joyful (Auracher et al, 2010 ). A more recent study (Kraxenberger and Menninghaus, 2016a ), however, could not replicate Auracher et al's ( 2010 ) findings and consequently questions a consistent frequency effect. Thus, it seems that the frequently assumed nexus between sound and emotion perception in poetry (e.g., Valéry, 1958 ; Fónagy, 1961 ; Tsur, 1992 ; Whissell, 2002 , 2011 ) might not consistently be driven by the frequency of occurrence of certain phoneme classes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 77%

Prosody-Based Sound-Emotion Associations in Poetry

2018

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Conveying emotions in spoken poetry may be based on a poem's semantic content and/or on emotional prosody, i.e., on acoustic features above single speech sounds. However, hypotheses of more direct sound–emotion relations in poetry, such as those based on the frequency of occurrence of certain phonemes, have not withstood empirical (re)testing. Therefore, we investigated sound–emotion associations based on prosodic features as a potential alternative route for the, at least partially, non-semantic expression and perception of emotions in poetry. We first conducted a pre-study designed to validate relevant parameters of joy- and sadness-supporting prosody in the recitation, i.e. acoustic production, of poetry. The parameters obtained thereof guided the experimental modification of recordings of German joyful and sad poems such that for each poem, three prosodic variants were constructed: one with a joy-supporting prosody, one with a sadness-supporting prosody, and a neutral variant. In the subsequent experiment, native German speakers and participants with no command of German rated the joyfulness and sadness of these three variants. This design allowed us to investigate the role of emotional prosody, operationalized in terms of sound-emotion parameters, both in combination with and dissociated from semantic access to the emotional content of the poems. The findings from our pre-study showed that the emotional content of poems (based on pre-classifications into joyful and sad) indeed predicted the prosodic features pitch and articulation rate. The subsequent perception experiment revealed that cues provided by joyful and sad prosody specifically affect non-German-speaking listeners' emotion ratings of the poems. Thus, the present investigation lends support to the hypothesis of prosody-based iconic relations between perceived emotion and sound qualia. At the same time, our findings also highlight that semantic access substantially decreases the role of cross-language sound–emotion associations and indicate that non-German-speaking participants may also use phonetic and prosodic cues other than the ones that were targeted and manipulated here.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 77%

Prosody-Based Sound-Emotion Associations in Poetry

2018

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“…Aryani and colleagues, for example, found that phonetic features that are statistically overrepresented compared to their frequency of occurrence in everyday language can also predict the emotional tone of poems (Aryani, Kraxenberger, Ullrich, Jacobs, & Conrad, 2016; see also Aryani et al, 2013). Furthermore, similar evidence comes from a comparison between results reported by Auracher et al (2010) and Kraxenberger and Menninghaus (2016). Both studies tested the relation between the average occurrence of certain phonemes (plosives and nasals) and the emotional tone of texts.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Sound Predicts Meaning: Cross‐Modal Associations Between Formant Frequency and Emotional Tone in Stanzas

Auracher

Scharinger

2020

Cognitive Science

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Research on the relation between sound and meaning in language has reported substantial evidence for implicit associations between articulatory-acoustic characteristics of phonemes and emotions. In the present study, we specifically tested the relation between the acoustic properties of a text and its emotional tone as perceived by readers. To this end, we asked participants to assess the emotional tone of single stanzas extracted from a large variety of poems. The selected stanzas had either an extremely high, a neutral, or an extremely low average formant dispersion. To assess the average formant dispersion per stanza, all words were phonetically transcribed and the distance between the first and second formant per vowel was calculated. Building on a long tradition of research on associations between sound frequency on the one hand and non-acoustic concepts such as size, strength, or happiness on the other hand, we hypothesized that stanzas with an extremely high average formant dispersion would be rated lower on items referring to Potency (dominance) and higher on items referring to Activity (arousal) and Evaluation (emotional valence). The results confirmed our hypotheses for the dimensions of Potency and Evaluation, but not for the dimension of Activity. We conclude that, at least in poetic language, extreme values of acoustic features of vowels are a significant predictor for the emotional tone of a text.

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“…font) or phonological form on the perceived emotional content of the poems. Several lines of work indicate that the perceived emotional content of a poem is at least partially explained by the phonological and / or prosodic content of poems [31,[40][41][42][43][44][45].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is less readable liked better? The case of font readability in poetry appreciation

Gao¹,

Dera²,

Nijhof³

et al. 2019

Preprint

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Previous research shows conflicting findings for the effect of font readability on comprehension and memory for language. It has been found that - perhaps counterintuitively – a hard to read font can be beneficial for language comprehension, especially for more difficult language. Here we test how font readability influences the subjective experience of poetry reading. In three experiments we tested the influence of poem difficulty and font readability on the subjective experience of poems. We specifically predicted that font readability would have opposite effects on the subjective experience of easy versus difficult poems. Participants read poems which could be more or less difficult in terms of conceptual or structural aspects, and which were presented in a font that was either easy or more difficult to read. Participants read existing poems and subsequently rated their subjective experience (overall liking, perceived flow of the poem, perceived topic clarity, and perceived structure). In line with previous literature we observed a Poem Difficulty x Font Readability interaction effect for subjective measures of poetry reading. We found that participants rated easy poems as less nice when they were presented in a hard to read font, as compared to when presented in an easy to read font. Despite the presence of the interaction effect, we did not observe the predicted opposite effect for more difficult poems. We conclude that font readability can influence reading of easy and more difficult poems differentially, with strongest effects for easy poems.

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Mimological Reveries? Disconfirming the Hypothesis of Phono-Emotional Iconicity in Poetry

Cited by 25 publications

References 54 publications

Prosody-Based Sound-Emotion Associations in Poetry

Prosody-Based Sound-Emotion Associations in Poetry

Sound Predicts Meaning: Cross‐Modal Associations Between Formant Frequency and Emotional Tone in Stanzas

Is less readable liked better? The case of font readability in poetry appreciation

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