Abstract
The current study used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and behavioral measures to examine effects of genre awareness on sentence processing and evaluation. We hypothesized that genre awareness modulates effects of genre-typical manipulations. We manipulated instructions between participants, either specifying a genre (poetry) or not (neutral). Sentences contained genre-typical variations of semantic congruency (congruent/incongruent) and morpho-phonological features (archaic/contemporary inflections). Offline ratings of meaningfulness (n = 64/group) showed higher average ratings for semantically incongruent sentences in the poetry vs. neutral condition. ERPs during sentence reading (n = 24/group; RSVP presentation at a fixed per-constituent rate; probe task) showed a left-lateralized N400-like effect for contemporary vs. archaic inflections. Semantic congruency elicited a bilateral posterior N400 effect for incongruent vs. congruent continuations followed by a centro-parietal positivity (P600). While N400 amplitudes were insensitive to the genre, the latency of the P600 was delayed by the poetry instruction. From these results, we conclude that during real-time sentence comprehension, readers are sensitive to subtle morphological manipulations and the implicit prosodic differences that accompany them. By contrast, genre awareness affects later stages of comprehension.
Highlights
We use language to express ourselves, to refer to the external world, and to appeal to others (Bühler, 1934)
Supplementing the findings of Gibbs et al (1991), these results suggest that the poetry schema adds to the categorical intentionality effect: reading poetry entails the controlled search for additional significance beyond plain sense (e.g., Culler, 1975; Thorne, 1988), if simple composition fails to yield a plausible/coherent representation of sentence meaning
On the other hand, we find no differences between the groups in terms of probe task performance (PoetryINST = NeutralINST), this would support the explanations that the memory effects observed in the delayed tasks of previous studies reflect slower reading and longer encoding (Hanauer, 1998b), or that they hinge on enhanced retrieval due to facilitating sound recurrences (Tillmann and Dowling, 2007)
Summary
We use language to express ourselves, to refer to the external world, and to appeal to others (Bühler, 1934). The selection and combination of speech sounds and meaningful elements serves to convey messages efficiently. Additional constraints on linguistic form derive from further communicative functions (Jakobson, 1960). In some types of nonspontaneous discourse – such as literature, rhetorical speeches, advertising, and other forms of propaganda – phonological form is consciously manipulated for a variety of purposes and effects (e.g., Wimsatt, 1944; McGlone and Tofighbakhsh, 2000; Menninghaus et al, 2014, 2015; Knoop et al, 2016). Poetry is interesting in this respect: as the writing process is not subject to the same practical constraints as daily communication, poets are free to create texts that satisfy a range of additional self-imposed formal constraints on the selection and combination of linguistic elements (e.g., Levin, 1962; Leech, 1969; Kintsch, 1998).
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