Speaker: Judith Beck @Judy
Affiliation: Center for Cognitive Science, Department of Psycholgoy, University of Freiburg
Title: The Experience of Rhythm and Beat in the Silent Reading of German Poetry. A ‘Perspectivity’ Shaped by Musical Activity?
Abstract (long version below): Various experimental studies on poetry have shown that readers can process rhythm, project metre and adjust their reading flow and tempo, presumably to an inner, partially or fully ongoing ‘beat’. However, less is known about the possible characteristics of such a rhythmic experience during reading, depending on the type of poem. To investigate this, a survey is conducted to examine the subjective self-perception of ‘rhythmic’ experience. Data on musical activity, as a potential modulating influence on subjective perception during reading, will also be collected. Preliminary results will be presented and implications for future research debated.
Long abstract
Experimental studies on reading poetry indicate that readers can process rhythm, project metre and adjust their reading flow and tempo, presumably to an inner, partially or fully ongoing ‘beat’, when reading aloud or silently [1-4]. Some studies do integrate rating scales that measure i.a. whether readers perceive a poetic text as less or more rhythmic or readers’ rhythmic ability (e.g. 5), often within the approach of empirical aesthetics [e.g. 6] but only few with the specific aim to gain a greater understanding of readers’ rhythmic experience. To date, there has been no large-scale survey that specifically investigates reader’s subjective perception and various features of their rhythm and beat experience when reading German poetry. The survey is intended to close this gap. Since both, poem characteristics as well as reader characteristics can influence the reading experience, this survey also tries to provide an initial understanding to which extent musical activity might shape the subjective reading experience of poetry as well as the ‘rhythm & beat attribution’.
A questionnaire was generated and the link to the online survey was distributed via email. Readers were presented with 9 poems of different types, namely 3x ballads, 3x sonetts, and 3x free verse poetry. Subjects were asked to read through each poem silently and ‘in one go’. After each stimulus, readers were presented with a question block that adressed in a first part (A) rhythmic, melodic, content-related and aesthetically affective experiences during reading as well as in a second part (B) reading fluency, poetry engagment and musical activity. In part A, participants were asked to indicate their answers on a visual analogue scale – based on the slider control on a mixing console – by moving the mouse pointer to the desired position on the slider. Used as a continuous scale, this option, in contrast to predetermined classic five- or seven-point scales, allows for haptic expressiveness of a subject’s perceived experience. In part B, a set of choice questions was given, and participants could select the appropriate option from e.g. drop-down selection. For all poems and their corresponding question blocks, the order of presentation was randomised to control for serial effects.
It is expected that a rhythmic experience of a reader will be modulated by whether a ‘beat’ is perceived at all. In addition, the ‘rhythm’ and the ‘beat attribution’ of musically active readers should differ from musically inactive readers such that 1) musically active readers perceive a ‘beat’ more often than non-active readers as well as 2) attribute it more often as steadily ongoing, i.e. from the beginning to the end of poem, than non-active readers. Also, poem type and reading fluency are assumed to be modulating factors. Results will be presented.
From a theoretical point of view, the presented survey is less concerned with the well-known claim that musical sophistication confers an advantage in reading ability or phonological awareness [for a critical review see 7], but rather with the assumption that one’s perspective on one’s own rhythmic experience when reading a poem can be influenced by one’s own musical level. Hence, if the survey, as presumed, reveals that musically active readers subjectively perceive and attribute rhythm and beat differently when reading poetry than non-musically active readers, the future debate about (and research on) how and why a poetic rhythm functions during reading, orally or silently, might have to focus more on the – perspectival – interplay between the two: the rhythmic aspects of the poetic language itself as well as the manifold musical characteristics of the readers.
References
[1] Beck, J., & Konieczny, L. (2021). Rhythmic subvocalization: An eye-tracking study on silent poetry reading. Journal of Eye Movement Research, 13(3). https://doi.org/10.16910/jemr.13.3.5 [2] Beck, J., & Konieczny, L. (2023). What a difference a syllable makes—Rhythmic reading of poetry. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1043651. Frontiers | What a difference a syllable makes—Rhythmic reading of poetry
[3] Blohm, S., Versace, S., Methner, S., Wagner, V., Schlesewsky, M., & Menninghaus, W. (2022). Reading Poetry and Prose: Eye Movements and Acoustic Evidence. Discourse Processes, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/0163853X.2021.2015188
[4] Fitzroy, A. B., & Breen, M. (2020). Metric structure and rhyme predictability modulate speech intensity during child-directed and read-alone productions of children’s literature. Language and Speech, 63(2), 292–305. https://doi.org/10.1177/0023830919843158
[5] Menninghaus, W., Wagner, V., Schindler, I., Knoop, C. A., Blohm, S., Frieler, K., & Scharinger, M. (2024). Parallelisms and deviations: Two fundamentals of an aesthetics of poetic diction. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 379(1895), 20220424. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2022.0424
[6] Scharinger, M., Knoop, C. A., Wagner, V., & Menninghaus, W. (2022). Neural processing of poems and songs is based on melodic properties. NeuroImage, 257, 119310. Redirecting [7] Schellenberg, E.G., & Lima, C.F. (2024). Music training and nonmusical abilities. Annual Review of Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-032323- 051354