Abstract
In this paper I would like to pave the ground for future studies in Computational Stylistics and (Neuro-)Cognitive Poetics by describing procedures for predicting the subjective beauty of words. A set of eight tentative word features is computed via Quantitative Narrative Analysis (QNA) and a novel metric for quantifying word beauty, the aesthetic potential is proposed. Application of machine learning algorithms fed with this QNA data shows that a classifier of the decision tree family excellently learns to split words into beautiful vs. ugly ones. The results shed light on surface and semantic features theoretically relevant for affective-aesthetic processes in literary reading and generate quantitative predictions for neuroaesthetic studies of verbal materials.
Highlights
When a reader’s brain processes information about single words like “LOVELY” or “SHRIEK,” many neural circuits work together to enable meaning making
In this paper I show an application of such tools to predict the beauty/ugliness of single words from the Neurocognitive Poetics perspective in an attempt to motivate and generate more neuroscientific research on this issue
Two predictors seem crucial for the classification at hand: a surface feature and a semantic one (AP)
Summary
When a reader’s brain processes information about single words like “LOVELY” or “SHRIEK,” many neural circuits work together to enable meaning making. There is practically no experimental research on aesthetic processes at the single word level (for exceptions, see Ponz et al, 2013; Jacobs et al, 2015) This is quite astonishing, given the success of neuroaesthetic research in other fields (e.g., Jacobsen et al, 2004; Jacobsen, 2006; Brattico et al, 2013; Leder, 2013; Nadal, 2013; Zeki et al, 2014; Marin, 2015) and work on the beauty of larger verbal materials, such as metaphors (McQuire et al, 2017), proverbs (Bohrn et al, 2013), idioms (Citron et al, 2016), or poems (Lüdtke et al, 2014; Hanauer, 2015). Cognitive neuroscience so far has not even begun to shed light on the neural bases of the development of literary experiences (Jacobs, 2015c), studies investigating the neural underpinnings of written language processing in children and adolescents are informative for the present purposes (e.g., Liebig et al, 2017)
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