RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 In Poetry, if Meter has to Help Memory, it Takes its Time
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2021.03.14.435310
DO 10.1101/2021.03.14.435310
A1 Sara Andreetta
A1 Oleksandra Soldatkina
A1 Vezha Boboeva
A1 Alessandro Treves
YR 2021
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/03/16/2021.03.14.435310.abstract
AB To test the idea that poetic meter emerged as a cognitive schema to aid verbal memory, we have focused on classical Italian poetry and on its three basic components of meter: rhyme, accent and verse length. Meaningless poems were generated by introducing prosody-invariant non-words into passages from Dante’s Divina Commedia and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, which were then further manipulated by selectively ablating rhymes, modifying accent patterns or altering the number of syllables. The resulting four versions of each non-poem were presented in a fully balanced design to cohorts of high school educated Italian native speakers, who were then asked to retrieve 3 target non-words. Surprisingly, we found that the integrity of Dante’s meter has no significant effect on memory performance. With passages derived from Ariosto, instead, removing each component downgrades memory by an amount proportional to its contribution to perceived metric plausibility, with rhymes having the strongest effects, followed by accents and then by verse length. 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.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.