In poetry, if meterhas tohelp memory, it takesitstime.

Abstract

To test the idea that poetic meter emerged as a cognitive schema to aid verbal memory, we focused on classical Italian poetry and on three components of meter: rhyme, accent,and verse length.Meaningless poems were generated by introducing prosody-invariant non-words into passages from Dante'sDivina Commediaand Ariosto'sOrlando Furioso. Wethenablated rhymes, modified accent patterns,or alteredthe number of syllables. The resulting versions of each non-poem were presented to Italian native speakers, who were then asked to retrievethreetargetnon-words. Surprisingly, we found that the integrity of Dante's meter has no significant effect on memory performance. With Ariosto, instead, removing each component downgrades memory proportionallyto its contribution to perceived metric plausibility. Counterintuitively, the fully metric versions required longer reaction times, implying that activating metric schemata involves a cognitive cost.Within schema theories, this finding provides evidence for high-level interactions between procedural and episodic memory.