Abstract
The power of poetry is universally acknowledged, but it is debatable whether its appreciation is reserved for experts. Here, we show that readers with no particular knowledge of a traditional form of Welsh poetry unconsciously distinguish phrases conforming to its complex poetic construction rules from those that violate them. We studied the brain response of native speakers of Welsh as they read meaningful sentences ending in a word that either complied with strict poetic construction rules, violated rules of consonantal repetition, violated stress pattern, or violated both these constraints. Upon reading the last word of each sentence, participants indicated sentence acceptability. As expected, our inexperienced participants did not explicitly distinguish between sentences that conformed to the poetic rules from those that violated them. However, in the case of orthodox sentences, the critical word elicited a distinctive brain response characteristic of target detection –the P3b– as compared to the other conditions, showing that speakers of Welsh with no expertise of this particular form of poetry implicitly detect poetic harmony. These results show for the first time that before we even consider literal meaning, the musical properties of poetry speak to the human mind in ways that escape consciousness.
Highlights
We found a significant main effect of Sentence Type; F(3,72) = 3.149, p = 0.03, η2p = 0.12; with Cynghanedd sentences eliciting greater mean amplitudes (M = 5.93, 95% CI [4.86, 7.01) than Consonantal violation sentences (M = 5.01, 95% CI [3.92, 6.10]; p = 0.01), Stress violation sentences (M = 4.88, 95% CI [3.58, 6.17]; p = 0.002), and Double violation sentences (M = 5.00, 95% CI [3.90, 6.09]; p = 0.007), respectively (Figure 3)
We investigated whether naïve readers of a traditional form of Welsh poetry are able to unconsciously distinguish phrases conforming to its poetic construction rules from those that violate them
In line with our predictions, words correctly completing a sentence in Cynghanedd elicited significantly greater P3b mean amplitudes than words completing other sentence types, indicating a shift of attention associated with target recognition (Polich, 2007)
Summary
Eliot famously argued that “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood” Was this an attempt to provoke controversy or can some aspects of poetry be processed implicitly and independently of meaning? Poetry is a literary expression of feelings, thoughts, and ideas, traditionally accentuated by metric constraints, rhyme, and alliteration. Recent scientific research looking into the effects of poetry has highlighted emotional responses to rhyme (Obermeier et al, 2013) and better memory recall as a result of alliteration (Hanauer, 2001; Lea et al, 2008). Whilst there is little doubt that some poetic forms, often centuries old, impact human cognition (see Jacobs, 2015, for a recent review), we have yet to discover the extent to which such sensitivity may rely on automatic and implicit neural processing
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