Alliterative phrases reach below the level of the word and pull back earlier lines that share their sound, which is why alliteration has long served as a powerful device for studying . Poets claim rhyme does something similar. Whether any other surface form reaches back the same way stayed open.
It reaches back and reactivates it. In the first experiment, participants recognized earlier poetic content faster when a rhyming cue pointed back at it. In the second, readers recruited as experts on the study and use of rhyme reproduced that same facilitation, and went further by anticipating rhymes that had not arrived yet.
Alliteration has long served as a powerful device for investigating implicit memory effects. Alliterative phrases work as reaching down to a sublexical level and reactivate previous information sharing the same alliterative content.
Whether other do the same was an open question, and one that matters because writers insist they do. The present study examined whether rhyme produces analogous memory-reactivation effects, given how widely it is used and how strongly its power is endorsed.
The first experiment tests the backward effect. Participants exhibited faster recognition responses to previous poetic content as a function of rhyming cues, which is the alliteration result transferred to a different surface form.
The second experiment adds expertise and finds something more. Participants identified as experts on the study and use of rhyme replicated the probe facilitations of the first experiment, and also revealed anticipations of . That bears on theories of memory-based text processing and of nonsemantic anticipation during reading.
wat. A rhyme is a retrieval cue pointing back up the page.
wat wat
It gives a measurable mechanism to something poets have always asserted about how a poem holds together.
How do we know?
Lea and colleagues cued readers with rhyming material and timed their recognition of earlier lines, then repeated the experiment with participants identified as experts on the study and use of rhyme.
What is still unknown
Recognition speed in a laboratory, which is a narrow window onto reading a poem.
Learn something?
Where to next
Do rhyme and rhythm change feeling without changing the words?poetry
Why does a story stay in your head after you close the book?reading
Can a few minutes with a text change how well you read another person?reading