Rhythmic subvocalization: An eye-tracking study on silent poetry reading

Abstract

The present study investigates effects of conventionally metered and rhymed poetry on eye-movements in silent reading. Readers saw MRRL poems (i.e., metrically regular, rhymed language) in two layouts. In poem layout, verse endings coincided with line breaks. In prose layout verse endings could be mid-line. We also added metrical and rhyme anomalies. We hypothesized that silently reading MRRL results in building up auditive expectations that are based on a rhythmic “audible gestalt” and propose that rhythmicity is generated through subvocalization. Our results revealed that readers were sensitive to rhythmic-gestalt-anomalies but showed differential effects in poem and prose layouts. Metrical anomalies in particular resulted in robust reading disruptions across a variety of eye-movement measures in the poem layout and caused re-reading of the local context. Rhyme anomalies elicited stronger effects in prose layout and resulted in systematic re-reading of pre-rhymes. The presence or absence of rhythmic-gestalt-anomalies, as well as the layout manipulation, also affected reading in general. Effects of syllable number indicated a high degree of subvocalization. The overall pattern of results suggests that eye-movements reflect, and are closely aligned with, the rhythmic subvocalization of MRRL. This study introduces a two-stage approach to the analysis of long MRRL stimuli and contributes to the discussion of how the processing of rhythm in music and speech may overlap.

Reading Russian poetry: An expert–novice study

“…We note that the depth of our analyses was constrained by the amount of available data, which, in turn, was partly determined by the limited availability of professional poets as participants. Hence, the data at hand did not support complex statistical models including, for instance, more text-structural variables that have been shown to affect poetry reading (Beck & Konieczny, 2021;Menninghaus & Wallot, 2021). To better assess whether poetic structure (e.g., stanza form or systematic rhyme) differentially affects poetry reading in expert-and novice readers, care should be taken in future investigations that each reader is presented with a sufficient number of texts.…”

“…Including main and interaction effects of text-and line position allowed us to approximate how participants navigated through the poems. Although this is, admittedly, a crude approximation that reduces texts to a linear sequence of words and disregards most of the text structure, e.g., the division of poems into lines and stanzas (Beck & Konieczny, 2021;Fechino et al, 2020;Menninghaus & Wallot, 2021), we refrained from including further structure-related variables, since the available data did not support overly complex models; higher-order interactions were excluded for the same reason. We then eliminated non-significant predictors from the initial base model in a stepwise fashion, using a liberal alpha level of p < .1.…”

Poetry-elicited emotions: Reading experience and psychological mechanisms.

“…Although eye-tracking studies have indicated that reading times and fixations are influenced by word properties, such as frequency or sonority (Xue et al, 2019), evidence has been found for rhythmic subvocalization during silent reading (Beck & Konieczny, 2020). This suggests that the internal rhythm of a poem might be indeed simulated through auditory imagery.…”

Do weak readers in rural India automatically read same language subtitles on Bollywood films? An eye gaze analysis

“…Although there is a substantial body of research on measuring the effect of SLS on reading using standardized tests, eye-tracking studies that focus on the development of reading skills are uncommon (Schroeder et al, 2015). Studies have examined gaze patterns while reading text or phrases (Beck & Konieczny, 2020;Geyer et al, 2020;Magyari et al, 2020). Smyrnakis et al (2021) compared the silent and loud reading ability of typical and dyslexic readers using eye-tracking while Faber et al (2020) investigated the differences in stable eye movement patterns during narrative reading.…”