Speaker: Stefan Blohm @StefanBlohm
Affiliation: Radboud University Nijmegen
Title: Rhyme as reason: Experimental evidence from Dutch verse
Abstract (long version below): Rhyme is a euphonic ornament of verbal art and song. Perhaps counterintuitively, rhyme may have quasi-semantic effects, e.g., making statements appear more accurate/convincing. Such rhyme-as-reason effects have been related to processing events during comprehension. Specifically, it has been argued that “rhyme […] affords statements an enhancement in processing fluency that can be misattributed to heightened conviction about their truthfulness” (McGlone & Tofighbakhsh, 2000). Here, we report evidence from a study of verse comprehension in Dutch that lends support to the key claim of the fluency-misattribution account: that rhyme facilitation during online sentence comprehension is systematically related to rhyme-induced semantic effects.
Long abstract
Rhyme is a euphonic ornament of verbal art and song. Perhaps counterintuitively, rhyme may have quasi-semantic effects, e.g., making statements appear more accurate/convincing. Such rhyme-as-reason effects have been related to processing events during comprehension. Specifically, it has been argued that “rhyme […] affords statements an enhancement in processing fluency that can be misattributed to heightened conviction about their truthfulness” (McGlone & Tofighbakhsh, 2000). Here, we report evidence from a study of verse comprehension in Dutch that lends support to the key claim of the fluency-misattribution account: that rhyme facilitation during online sentence comprehension is systematically related to rhyme-induced semantic effects.
Summary: Combining eye-tracking during reading with intuitive semantic judgments allowed us to test the hypotheses that 1) rhyme leads comprehenders to perceive a “deeper meaning” in statements, that 2) rhyme facilitates word processing (e.g., Obermeier et al., 2016), and that 3) rhyme-induced facilitation predicts rhyme-dependent meaningfulness effects. We selected 48 couplets of Dutch verse and created non-rhyming versions by replacing the first rhyme word (pre-rhyme) with a synonym as in example (1).
(1) wat niemand kan weten/kennen || kan ik niet meten
what nobody can know can I not measure
‘I cannot measure what nobody can know’
Participants (n=54) read each couplet in either the original or the modified version while their eye movements were recorded; they rated the aesthetic appeal, comprehensibility, and perceived meaningfulness of each couplet on a quasi-continuous scale (0-100). Linear mixed-effects regression analyses of ratings and of several gaze-time measures confirmed that rhyming couplets were perceived as more meaningful than non-rhyming versions (rhyme-as-reason effect; H1; p = .019) but failed to reveal a general facilitation effect of rhyme (fluency effect; H2; all ps > .20). Crucially, results of multiple linear regression indeed support the fluency-misattribution account, showing that rhyme-induced differences in total reading times of critical rhyme words partly accounted (ΔR2 = 0.11) for the observed meaningfulness effect of rhyme (H3; p = .023).
We further collected self-report data about participants’ reading habits (Kuijpers, Douglas & Kuiken, 2019), and administered standardized tests of personality traits (Big Five Inventory; Denissen et al., 2008) and print exposure (Dutch author recognition test; Brysbaert et al., 2020). We used the self-report data to calculate a “poetry-affinity index”, which allowed us to assess whether affinity for poetry can be predicted on the basis of personality traits or prior print exposure. Results of this analysis not only revealed that – similar to other aesthetic domains – openness to experience is a key determinant of poetry affinity (ΔR2 = 0.21) but also identified neuroticism (ΔR2 = 0.06) as a relevant personality trait.
References
Brysbaert, M., Sui, L., Dirix, N., & Hintz, F. (2020). Dutch author recognition test. Journal of Cognition, 3(1), 6. doi:10.5334/joc.95
Denissen, J. J. A., Geenen, R., van Aken, M. A. G., Gosling, S. D., & Potter, J. (2008). Development and validation of a Dutch translation of the Big Five Inventory (BFI). Journal of Personality Assessment, 90, 152-157. doi:10.1080/00223890701845229
Kuijpers, M., Douglas, S., & Kuiken, D. (2019). Personality traits and reading habits that predict absorbed narrative fiction reading. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 13(1), 74-88. doi:10.1037/aca0000168
McGlone, M. S., & Tofighbakhsh, J. (2000). Birds of a feather flock conjointly (?): Rhyme as reason in aphorisms. Psychological Science, 11(5), 424–428. doi:10.1111/1467-9280.00282
Obermeier, C., Kotz, S. A., Jessen, S., Raettig, T., von Koppenfels, M., & Menninghaus, W. (2016). Aesthetic appreciation of poetry correlates with ease of processing in event-related potentials. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 16(2), 362-373. doi:10.3758/s13415-015-0396-x