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 Emotional effects of poetic phonology,
word positioning and dominant stress peaks
in poetry reading

Maria Kraxenberger and Winfried Menninghaus

Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics

This study tested the hypothesis that features of linguistically non-mandatory

phonological recurrence (rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and consonance),
parameters of word positioning (position within a line and line position) and
dominant stress peaks are related to readers identification of distinctively joyful
and sad words in poetry. To this end, forty-eight participants read eight German
poems, completed an underlining task, and filled out a brief questionnaire.
Results show that these target features are clearly of importance for readers per-
ception of pronounced levels of joy and sadness. Words featuring alliteration, as-
sonance or consonance were significantly more often underlined as distinctively
joyful than were words that lack these features. Our study shows also that words
that feature a dominant stress peak and are placed in more advanced positions
within the poems were more likely to be identified as emotional (distinctively
joyful and sad) when compared to words in earlier and unstressed positions.

Keywords: poetry, joy, sadness, dominant stress peaks, underlining task, poetic
phonology, word position

Introduction

In his Essay on Criticism from 1711, the poet and critic Alexander Pope expressed
the idea that sound contributes significantly to the expression, elicitation and per-
ception of emotions in poetry. This view, although shared by many, if not most po-
ets and poetry-devotees, has been and remains controversial (Genette, 1976/1995).
Still, theoretical reflections as well as empirical studies on emotional aspects
of poetry have repeatedly highlighted the importance of sound features (e.g.,
Aristotle, 2005; Aryani, Kraxenberger, Ulrich, Conrad, & Jacobs, 2016; Fnagy,
1961; Jakobson & Waugh, 1979/2002; Menninghaus, Wagner, Wassiliwizky,

Scientific Study of Literature 6:2 (2016), 298313. doi 10.1075/ssol.6.2.06kra

issn 22104372/e-issn 22104380 John Benjamins Publishing Company
 Emotional effects of poetic phonology 299

Jacobsen, & Knoop, 2017; Obermeier, Menninghaus, von Koppenfels, Raettig,

Schmidt-Kassow, Otterbein, & Kotz, 2013; Obermeier, Kotz, Jessen, Raettig, von
Koppenfels, & Menninghaus, 2016; Schrott & Jacobs, 2011; Tsur, 1992; Valry,
1958; Whissell, 2002, 2011).
Focusing on sound in poetry in terms of the phonemic inventory, some stud-
ies reported a non-arbitrary relation between the frequencies of occurrence of cer-
tain phoneme classes and emotional meaning, i.e., a given phonemes emotional
connotation and its influence on the perception of a poem s emotional tonality
(Albers, 2008; Auracher, Albers, Zhai, Gareeva, & Stavniychuk, 2010; Wiseman &
Van Peer, 2003). Retesting these findings, however, a recent study found no evi-
dence in support of this assumption (Kraxenberger & Menninghaus, 2016) which
is often referred to as the hypothesis of sound, phonological or phono-emotional
iconicity.
Readings of poems are likely to be influenced by both the semantic content and
the formal qualities of diction (such as phonological and other poetic/rhetorical
figures).1 The present study exclusively focused on the relevance of phonological
features of poetic diction for readers identification of strongly emotional passages
in poetry reading. Poetry reading is widely believed to be particularly attentive
and sensitive to (reoccurring) sound patterns of a poem as being non-arbitrary
and non-random parts of the message (Beaugrande, 1978). On this premise, we
focused on a variety of phonological figures of recurrence (end rhyme, alliteration,
assonance, consonance) and specifically expected that they have a bearing on read-
ers identification of strongly emotional passages in poems. Because effects of such
figures are established over the temporal trajectory of reading a poem, we further
considered two types of word positioning: word positions within individual lines,
and word positions within the entire poem. Our choice of the position parameters
was informed by ancient theories of poetic clausulae/cadences, which suggest that
poets and orators should take particular care when selecting the final words of
sentences, paragraphs/stanzas, and entire texts (Aristotle, 2005; Lausberg, 2008;
Quintilian, 1953). In addition, we also considered dominant stress-peak positions
within prosodic-metrical units. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to
investigate empirically the role of these features (co-occurrence with dominant
stress peak, position within a line, position within the entire poem) for readers
identification of distinctively joyful and sad passages in poetry.
While the hypothetical position effects have barely received any attention,
our target features of phonological recurrence have already been considered im-
portant for emotion perception in poetry in previous studies (e.g. Hanauer, 1996;

1. For reports on the influence of lexical valence on the emotion perception in poetry, see for
instance Jacobs, 2015; Aryani, Jacobs, & Conrad, 2013.

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300 Maria Kraxenberger and Winfried Menninghaus

Jacobs, Ldtke & Meyer-Sickendiek, 2013; Van Peer, 1986). Specifically, it has been
shown that both rhyme and regular meter can lead to enhanced aesthetic appreci-
ation, higher intensity in processing, and more positively perceived and felt emo-
tions (Menninghaus, Bohrn, Altmann, Lubrich, & Jacobs, 2014; Damasio, 1994;
Obermeier et al., 2013, 2016), regardless and independent of which emotions were
specifically evoked by the respective poems. Furthermore, linguistic research on
phoneme monitoring indicates that the processing of rhythmically structured
sound sequences favors an attentional focus on the stressed units (Cutler, 1976;
Pitt & Samuel, 1990; Shields, McHugh, & Martin, 1974). Further, there is evidence
that poetic phonology, e.g., meter (Van Peer, 1990), rhyme (Horn, 1996) and
alliteration (Lea, Rapp, Elfenbein, Mitchel, & Romine, 2008), also has enhancing
effects on readers aesthetic experience and on their recall of sentences or poems,
respectively.
However, it is not clear to date which formal features of diction, if any, un-
derlie readers active identification of strongly emotional (i.e., distinctively joyful
or sad) passages in poetry. The present study set out to investigate this question
using original German poems from the 20th century. In order to take advantage
of a pronounced contrast, we exclusively focused on the two emblems of our af-
fective life (Damasio, 1994), the basic emotions of joy and sadness (Ekman, 1992;
Russell, 1980; Schmitz, 1969). These two emotions are commonly viewed as op-
posite affective phenomena with markedly different phenomenological qualities
(Demmerling & Landweer, 2007; see also Kraxenberger & Menninghaus, 2016).
Summing up, we expected that (1) the occurrence of several recurrent fea-
tures of poetic phonology (rhyme, alliteration, assonance, consonance) and (2)
two types of word positioning (position within a line, position within the entire
poem) and (3) dominent stress peaks would be predictors of the passages partici-
pants would identify as distinctively joyful and sad.

Material and methods

Selected stimuli
We selected four joyful and four sad German poems from the 20th century as
stimuli. The selected poems were comparable on a formal level since all of them
were between 10 and 16 lines long featured end rhymes (pair or cross rhymes), and
had a predominantly iambic meter (for a more detailed description of the selected
poems, see Appendix 1).

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 Emotional effects of poetic phonology 301

Participants
Forty-eight participants (33 women, 15 men) took part in the study. Mean age was
24.25 years (SD=4.33; min=18; max=40). To be included in the study, partici-
pants had to be native speakers of German and of full legal age. All participants
received monetary compensation; all experimental procedures were ethically ap-
proved by the Ethics Council of the Max Planck Society, and were undertaken with
the informed consent of each participant.

Questionnaire and underlining task

In a within-participant design,2 participants were asked to first read a poem, then
to fill out a brief pen and paper questionnaire, and finally to complete an under-
lining task, before moving on to the next poem. This way, participants read, rated
and underlined all eight poems consecutively. The order of poems and items was
randomized to control for order effects across participants.
The questionnaire included a bipolar, 7-point item (hereafter: Emotion) de-
signed to measure to what extent participants assigned the dominant emotion of a
poem rather to the pole of joy (1) or to that of sadness (7).3 To control for possible
effects of familiarity with the poems, participants were asked to indicate whether
they knew any of the poems.
Furthermore, we used an underlining task to identify those passages in the
poems that participants perceived as distinctively joyful or sad (Please underline
those passages in the poem that you perceive as distinctively joyful/sad). Participants
were also asked to use differently colored text markers to underline those passages
that they considered either distinctively joyful (to be underlined in red) or dis-
tinctively sad (to be underlined in blue).4 They were explicitly instructed that they

2. In simplified terms, within-participants analyses are usually understood to have two main
advantages over between-participants analyses: internal validity independent of random assign-
ment, as well as a substantial boost in statistical power (see for instance, Charness, Gneezy,
& Kuhn, 2012). Further, the economical aspect of a lower number of participants required to
complete a study can also be considered an advantage.

3. Given the particular hypotheses and research questions addressed in this article, some ad-
ditional items from the questionnaire were not considered in the analyses presented here.

4. Originally, participants had the option to underline also those passages that they considered
most emotional in a third color (yellow). However, this additional measure of our emotion at-
tribution task turned out to be too unspecific and too vaguely defined. In line with participants
comments during data acquisition, a two-tailed Pearson Correlation showed a highly significant
correlation with both joyful and sad underlings (N=626; all r.26; all p.001). Therefore, we
excluded this measure from further analyses.

2016. John Benjamins Publishing Company

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302 Maria Kraxenberger and Winfried Menninghaus

could, but did not have to use all given colors in response to the same poem, and
that they could underline a passage with more than one color.

Text analyses
Given the deliberately vague wording (i.e., passages) of the underlining task,
participants were free to select any possible unit, e.g., punctuation, single letters,
syllables, words, lines, or the whole of a text. Since none of the participants chose
to underline a unit smaller than a word, we conducted all analyses on the word
level only. Thus, the basic unit for all analyses was the single word, considered in
isolation, as well as with regard to its position within the respective line and within
the entire poem.
Consequently, we annotated the underlinings of distinctively joyful and sad
passages per participant per word for each poem. In order to annotate the phono-
logical target features, we performed grapheme-to-phoneme conversion and syl-
labification for all poems using WebMaus (Reichel, 2012; Reichel & Kisler, 2014).
Independent of the participants focus on the word level, two experts analyzed
dominant stress peaks, end rhymes, alliterations, assonances, as well as conso-
nances on the level of the syllable (see Figure 1 for examples). Outcomes were
discussed until an agreement was reached.5
Assonances were defined as vocalic recurrences in stressed syllables of two
or more neighboring words. Vowels in unstressed syllables were taken into ac-
count only within the immediate vicinity of assonating words. Phonemes, as well
as combinations of phonemes which are relatively unlikely to occur (such as cer-
tain diphthongs, German umlaut-vowels and the phoneme /u:/), were considered
to contribute to an assonance if they reoccurred within two lines (or ten syllables)
of the same stanza. If those phonemes (or combinations of phonemes) occurred
three times within the same stanza, they were also taken into account, irrespective
of whether they occurred in stressed or unstressed syllables. Furthermore, line-
framing syllables, i.e., the first and the last stressed syllable of a line, could also
establish an assonance.
Alliterations were defined as consonant recurrences at the beginning of con-
secutive words. We only considered those phonological recurrences that were

5. Experts were a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature (first author of the paper) and a
research assistant (Master student in Comparative Literature, holding a Bachelors degree in
German Linguistics and Literature Studies). Text analyses were carried out separately by both
experts without knowledge of the results of the underlining task. In cases of uncertainty, i.e.,
cases where the two analyses arrived at different results, the senior author of this paper was
consulted; he is a professor of Comparative Literature and the director of the Department of
Language and Literature at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt/Main.

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 Emotional effects of poetic phonology 303

Example1. From Die Zerwartung (Thoor, 1965; lines 2 & 3)

Level 3 x x x
Level 2 x x x x
Level 1 x x x x x x x x x x
German original Ein Seuf zer fin det nicht mehr heim. || Er schielt
phonemization ai n z y f ts fin dt nit m e  h ai m  i l t
alliteration
assonance
consonance
end rhyme *
word position within the line 0.125 0.25 0.25 0.375 0.375 0.5 0.625 0.75 0.875 1

Level 3 x x x x
Level 2 x x x x x x
Level 1 x x x x x x x x x x x x x
German original der Zeit durchs Schlss el loch. || Ein Lied ist aus ge sun gen.
phonemization d e t s ai t d  s lys l lx ai n l i t ist a s  z n
alliteration
assonance
consonance
end rhyme *
word position within the line 0.125 0.25 0.375 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.625 0.75 0.875 1 1 1 1

*depicted words do not rhyme with each other, but with the verse-final words from line 1 and line 4

Example 2. From Sommersonett (Bergengruen, 1950; lines 2 & 3)

Level 3 x
Level 2 x x x x x
Level 1 x x x x x x x x x x x
German original ge schrf ten Sich eln Sil ber blitz e glim men,
phonemization  f tn zi ln zil b blits lim n
alliteration
assonance
consonance
end rhyme
word position within the line 0.25 0.25 0.25 0.5 0.5 0.75 0.75 0.75 0.75 1 1

Level 3 x x
Level 2 x x x x
Level 1 x x x x x x x x x x x
German original zur hei en Zeit | be fl geln sich die Im men
phonemization ts u h ai sn ts ai t b f l y ln zi d i im n
alliteration
assonance
consonance
end rhyme
word position within the line 0.12 0.29 0.29 0.43 0.57 0.57 0.57 0.71 0.86 1 1

Figure1. Examples of textual analyses

separated by no more than one stressed syllable (regardless of line boundaries).

Three or more words of high semantic value (such as important content words)
that begin with the same consonants were counted as alliterations, regardless of
whether the alliterating phonemes were in a stressed or unstressed position and
regardless of the syllabic distance between them. As for assonances, line-framing
syllables could also establish an alliteration.
Repetitions of two combined stressed phonemes were considered as mark-
ing an assonance or an alliteration when they were separated by no more than
two other stressed vowels (or syllables). For three or four stressed repetitions, a

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304 Maria Kraxenberger and Winfried Menninghaus

maximum distance of 20 syllables or two lines was chosen. Phonological repeti-

tions that occurred at the same position over the course of three or four subse-
quent lines were also counted among assonances or alliterations, respectively.
Consonances were defined as repetitions of a consonant within three con-
secutive words. For the phoneme /n/, which is very frequent in German, four
repetitions were required to warrant inclusion. For the infrequent //-phoneme
on the contrary, only two repetitions were required to establish a consonance.
Double-consonants were regarded as one phoneme; the same holds for affricates.
Compound words were treated as combinations of two (or more) single words;
hence the individual source words were considered as separate contributors to as-
sonances, alliterations or consonances.
End rhymes (hereafter: Rhyme) were annotated separately from other figures
of phonological recurrence. That is, line-final words were assigned to the catego-
ry of rhyming words if they rhymed with any other line-final word in the entire
poem. Further, rhyme words could also be part of an assonance, alliteration or
consonance with adjacent words, following the criteria described above. In such
cases, rhyme words that were also part of another figure of phonological recur-
rence were annotated for all applicable categories (e.g., end rhyme and alliteration;
for an example, see Figure1). Multiple features were likewise assigned to individ-
ual syllables, because all features of phonological recurrence and word positioning
were coded separately.
Metrical stress cannot by itself serve as a predictor for words that are perceived
as particularly emotional; after all, in iambic and trochaic verses, every other syl-
lable is stressed, and hence every non-monosyllabic word features at least one
metrical stress. Therefore, we took recourse to the concept of linguistic sentence/
phrase stress that identifies a stress peak within a given prosodic-metrical unit
(Jespersen, 1933; Liberman & Prince, 1977; Selkirk, 1984). This stress quality is far
more selective than mere metrical stress. In poetry, the syllables that carry phrasal
or sentence stress peaks nearly invariably also carry regular metrical stress. Thus,
these syllables and the words they are part of are doubly highlighted in their
immediate linguistic environment.
We moreover took into account the position of a word both within individual
lines and within entire poems (i.e., the position of the line in which a word oc-
curred). Since not all of our stimuli were structured in stanzas (see Select Stimuli
and Appendix 1), we did not consider a potential third level of word position-
ing, i.e. word position within individual stanzas. Regarding the distribution of
minor stresses and dominant stress peaks, we considered not the line but rather
the prosodic-metrical units marked by minor or major caesurae (indicated in the
given examples by vertical strokes). Syntactic incisions marked by punctuation
were defined as major caesurae; other pauses of speech were considered minor

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 Emotional effects of poetic phonology 305

caesurae. We distinguished three levels of stress (see Figure1). On the first level,
we assessed whether the metrical positions are correctly filled or not. On the sec-
ond level, minor stresses were annotated. Dominant stress peaks (i.e., syllables
that are semantically important and syntactically/prosodically prominent) were
annotated on Level 3.
Due to participants choice for the word level, we subsequently assigned all
annotations from the syllabic level to the word level. The presence or absence of all
analyzed features as well as the derived values for word positioning were coded in
a binary fashion for each word in our corpus.
Since alliteration, assonance and consonance occasionally co-occur in the
very same words, underlinings often could not tell them apart sufficiently. For this
reason, they were all subsumed under one variable. Hence, alliteration/assonance/
consonance represent one binary coded variable that indicated whether or not a
word was part of at least one alliteration, assonance or consonance.
Word positions within a given line and the position of a line within a given
poem were also annotated, and each word within a given line was assigned a rela-
tive value dependent on the sum of all words of the respective line. Thus, in a line
that had, for instance, 10 words, the first word was assigned the value of 0.1, the
second word the value of 0.2, and the tenth word the value of 1. We used the same
procedure to assign relative values to the position of single lines dependent on the
sum of all lines in a given poem.

Statistical analyses
We analyzed the underlinings for joyful and sad passages using generalized logistic
mixed models with crossed random effects for poems and participants (Baayen,
Davidson & Bates, 2008) to test whether the analyzed features could predict par-
ticipants underlinings of strongly emotional passages. We chose logistic models
since the dependent variables (underlinings for joyful/sad passages) were coded in
a binary way (underlined vs. not underlined). Mixed effects analyses were carried
out in R (R Core Team, 2013) using the package lme4 (Bates, Maechler, Bolker &
Walkers, 2014). All other analyses were conducted in SPSS (IBM SPSS Statistics
for Windows, Version 22.0, IBM Corp., 2013). As fixed effects, we used partici-
pants Emotion ratings,6 the occurrence of alliteration/ assonance/ consonance,
end rhymes, dominant stress peaks, as well as the position of a word within a given
line, and the position of a line within a poem. Since end rhymes could be part of
alliterations, assonances, and consonances and by definition occur at the end of a
line, we included interaction terms for Rhyme and the occurrence of alliteration/

6. For the analyses, we centered this variables ranging from 3 (joyful) to +3 (sad).

2016. John Benjamins Publishing Company

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306 Maria Kraxenberger and Winfried Menninghaus

assonance/consonance, as well as for Rhyme and the position of a word within a

line. Further, we included interaction terms for alliteration/assonance/consonance
and word position within a line, as well as for alliteration/assonance/consonance
and position of a line within a poem (see Table1). This model was applied to pre-
dicting both the underlinings of distinctively joyful and of distinctively sad words.

Results

To test whether participants confirmed our classification of the poems as either

predominantly joyful or predominantly sad, we inspected the mean values of all
poems on the item that measured participants Emotion-ratings. The means of
the four joyful poems (M=2.04; SD=1.23) were all well below the midpoint of
the scale (4), whereas the means of the four sad poems (M=6.19; SD=.85) were
all above the midpoint. We applied an analysis of variance to test for differences
regarding the Emotion ratings for poems classified as joyful and those classified
as sad. Results showed that the poems that were a priori classified as joyful were
also rated as significantly more joyful by our participants (and as less sad than the
poems classified as sad (p.001; 2=.79).7
In total, the eight poems consisted of 626 words. To control for possible famil-
iarity effects, we tested whether a majority of participants was familiar with any
particular poem. Since none of the selected poems turned out to be familiar to
more than 10% of the participants, we did not exclude any data based on familiar-
ity ratings.8 However, we excluded four cases from further analyses in which four
different participants had each underlined an entire poem. Among the remaining
poems, 14% of the words were underlined as joyful and 18.3% were underlined as
sad. In the joyful poems alone, 25.1% of the words were underlined as joyful and
3.6% were underlined as sad, whereas in the sad poems alone, participants under-
lined 4.6% of the words as joyful and 30.8% as sad.
Results of the mixed-effects analyses showed that Emotion ratings had a sig-
nificant influence on participants underlinings of strongly emotional words (un-
derlining of joyful words: z=4.10; p.001; underlining of sad words: z=6.61;
p.001).

7. N=192 for each group of poems was obtained by 48 participants who rated four joyful and
four sad poems each.

8. Four of the participants (8.3%) knew Morgenwonne; two participants (4.2%) knew Liebeslied.
Sommersonett, Dmmerung and Trauermarsch were familiar to one person each (2.1%). Spt, O
leuchtender Septembertag and Die Zerwartung were unknown to all participants.

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 Emotional effects of poetic phonology 307

Table1 summarizes results of the statistical analyses for underlinings of joyful

and sad passages using generalized logistic mixed models with crossed random
effects for poems and participants.

Table1. Summary of included fixed effects and interaction terms to predict participants
underlinings of joyful and sad words
Parameter (fixed effects and interaction terms) Underlining of Underlining of
joyful words sad words
Emotion-rating 0.10 (0.02)*** 0.14 (0.02)***
Alliteration/Assonance/Consonance 0.48 (0.14)*** 0.10 (0.12)n.s.
End rhyme 0.28 (0.40)n.s. 0.28 (0.51)n.s.
Dominant Stress peak 0.50 (0.04)*** 0.28 (0.04)***
Word position within a given line 0.72 (0.11)*** 0.91 (0.09)***
Position of a given line within a poem 0.97 (0.10)*** 0.62 (0.07)***
Alliteration/Assonance/Consonance* End rhyme 0.09 (0.13)n.s. 0.13 (0.13)n.s.
Alliteration/Assonance/Consonance* Word position within 0.44 (0.20)* 0.60 (0.18)***
a given line
Alliteration/Assonance/Consonance* Position of a given 1.11 (0.13)*** 0.42 (0.12)***
line within a poem
End rhyme* Word position within a given line 0.62 (0.41)n.s. 0.32 (0.52)n.s.
Note. Fixed effects and interaction terms are listed separately for underlinings of joyful and sad words:
Estimates and standard errors (in parentheses). Interactions terms for fixed effects are marked with *.
n.s.: p>.05; * p<.05; ** p<.01; *** p.001.

Analyses showed that alliteration/assonance/consonance had a significant effect

on underlinings of joyful words (z=3.49; p.001), but not of sad words (z<1).
Rhyme showed no relation to participants underlinings of joyful (z<1) and sad
words (z<1). Likewise, in both models, neither the interaction term for Rhyme
and alliteration/assonance/consonance, nor that for Rhyme and word position
within a line reached statistical significance (all z<1).
For underlinings of joyful and sad passages, we found main effects of domi-
nant stress peaks (words underlined as joyful: z=11.61; p.001; words under-
lined as sad: z=7.50; p.001), word position within a line (words underlined as
joyful: z=6.23; p.001; words underlined as sad: z=10.19; p.001), and line
position within a poem (words underlined as joyful: z=11.46; p.001; words
underlined as sad: z=8.51; p.001).
Further, both models showed significant interactions for alliteration/asso-
nance/consonance and word position within a line, as well as for alliteration/asso-
nance/consonance and position of a line. Regarding the prediction of joyful under-
linings, alliteration/assonance/consonance and word position within a line showed

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308 Maria Kraxenberger and Winfried Menninghaus

a positive interaction (b=0.43; z=2.20; p=.03). This implies that the effect of
alliteration/assonance/consonance further enhanced the effects of word position
within a line. The interaction of alliteration/assonance/consonance and line posi-
tion within a poem was negative (b=1.11; z=8.30; p.001), e.g., the effect of
alliteration/assonance/consonance on participants underlinings of words as joy-
ful reduced the respective effect of position of a line within a poem. Conversely, for
the prediction of underlinings of sad words, the interaction between alliteration/
assonance/consonance and word position within a line was negative (b=0.60;
z=3.39; p.001), whereas the interaction between alliteration/assonance/con-
sonance and line position within a poem was positive (b=0.42; z=3.38; p.001).

Discussion and outlook

The present study set out to investigate whether rhyme and alliteration/assonance/
consonance are related to participants perception of emotionally distinctive pas-
sages specifically, the assignment of pronounced levels of perceived joy and sad-
ness to specific passages of the poems in an underlining task. We furthermore
considered dominant stress peaks, as well as word positioning within a given line
and within an entire poem.
Results clearly show that words that stand out by virtue of figures of phono-
logical recurrence (in detail: alliteration, assonance, consonance) are particularly
important for readers identification of perceived joy in poetry. However, the rela-
tion between participants underlinings of distinctively sad words, and the pooled
assessment of alliteration, assonance and consonance did not reach statistical sig-
nificance. Most likely, the significant interactions between alliteration/assonance/
consonance and word position within a line as well as line position within a poem
have overridden the expected emotional effects of alliteration, assonance and con-
sonance (see below).
Our finding that end rhymes were not predictive for participants underlin-
ings of distinctively joyful or sad words contradict previous research that reported
a heightened intensity of emotional processing due to regular meter and rhyme
(Obermeier et al., 2013) only at first glance. Since all of our stimuli featured end
rhymes, our analyses do not allow for a comparison of rhyme effects across rhymed
and unrhymed poems. Moreover, overall emotional intensity, regardless of affec-
tive valence and of which specific emotions are involved, is not identical with the
identification of distinctive levels of joy and sadness, specifically. Therefore, future
studies that consider a more heterogeneous sample of poems, especially regarding
the occurrence of rhyme, would add further nuance to our findings.

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 Emotional effects of poetic phonology 309

Moreover, our analyses show that dominant stress peaks were significantly
related to participants underlinings of distinctively joyful as well as distinctively
sad words. Given that our study is the first to consider dominant stress peaks as
predictors of perceived joy and sadness in poetry, it is difficult to evaluate the
significance of our finding. After all, in German prosody, dominant stress peaks
are typically expected to be placed on words that carry focus features and thus can
make a particularly salient contribution to sentence meaning (Wiese, 1996). If one
considers perceived emotional content as one important dimension of sentence
meaning, one could conclude that distinctively emotional words within a given
sentence/phrase should, as a rule, always be more likely to carry a sentence stress
than other words. This should apply regardless of whether the context is daily con-
versation, literary prose, or poetry. Thus, our finding may not be distinctive of
poetry. However, for the time being, this possibility cannot be taken for granted.
In line with ancient theories of poetic clausulae/cadences (Aristotle, 2005;
Lausberg, 2008; Quintilian, 1953, see Introduction), our results also show that
words that occur later rather than earlier within a line or a text are likewise of
special importance for participants identification of distinctively joyful and sad
words in poetry. These effects of word positioning, can, however, be influenced by
interactions with alliterations, assonances or consonances.
Regarding the prediction of underlings distinctively of joyful words, allit-
eration/assonance/consonance showed a positive interaction with word position
within a given line and a negative interaction with the position of a line within a
given poem. Regarding the prediction of underlinings of sad words, we found an
inverse pattern, i.e., a negative interaction for alliteration/assonance/consonance
and word position within a line and a positive interaction for alliteration/asso-
nance/consonance and position of a line within a given poem. Regardless of the
respective nature of these interactions, our data highlight the artful interplay of
different parameters that are not only interrelated with each other, but most im-
portantly jointly constitute the sound gestalt of a poem.
Follow-up studies that might add further nuance to our findings are clearly
called for. Such studies might focus on poems with a greater variety of emotional
tonality, draw on physiological data, and compare different reading habits and
modes (e.g., silent vs. loud reading; visual vs. acoustic presentation of stimuli).
To conclude, our study strongly supports the notion that poetic phonology is
specifically related to the perception of strongly emotional passages during poetry
reading. Our findings significantly extend this understanding by showing that two
different levels of word positioning and dominant stress peaks are likewise pre-
dictors of distinctively joyful and sad passages in poetry. Thus, our results high-
light the importance of the careful manner in which poets select and combine
words, and, specifically, that non-semantic dimensions of both their phonological

2016. John Benjamins Publishing Company

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310 Maria Kraxenberger and Winfried Menninghaus

patterning and their compositional placement within lines and the trajectory of a
poem enable readers to perceive pronounced levels of joy and sadness in a poem.
Besides this major finding, our study indicates that sound-based features of poetry
are related to the emotional perception (and probably the emotional processing)
of a given poem. Coming back to the notion of phonological iconicity in poetry,
we here argue for a nexus between sound and emotion perception in poetry that
can be established via formal, structural features of poetry that shape the sound
gestalt of a poem (Ehrenfels, 1937; Jakobson, 1960). These sound-emotion asso-
ciations might also be important for other text forms that are closely linked to the
expression and perceptions of emotions. Examples are, among others, political or
religious speeches, advertisements, as well as all other texts that try to convey their
message with the best words in the best order (Coleridge, 1835).

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Valentin Wagner for his helpful comments regarding study design and
analyses and Marissa Gemma as well as Christine Knoop for their useful comments on the man-
uscript. We thank Sascha Rothbart for his help with the stylistic analyses, R. Muralikrishnan for
programming help, Barbara Budai for her support on data input and Stefan Blohm and Eugen
Wassiliwizky for their comments on the analyses of the revised manuscript. In addition, we want
to thank Don Kuiken for his useful comments as action editor, which improved our manuscript
and analyses substantially.

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 Emotional effects of poetic phonology 313

Appendix 1. Titles, authors, publication date and general features of the

analyzed poems

Title Author Publication No. of No. of No. of Joyful vs.

date lines stanzas words Sad
Sommersonett Bergengruen, Werner 1950 14 4 84 joy
Trauermarsch Goll, Yvan 1924 13 1 88 sad
O leuchtender Haller, Paul 1922 12 3 64 joy
Septembertag
Spt Hardekopf, Ferdinand 1963 12 3 74 sad
Liebeslied: Dein Klabund 1927 16 1 84 joy
Mund
Dmmerung Lasker-Schler, Else 1943 10 1 64 sad
Morgenwonne Ringelnatz, Joachim 1932 12 3 57 joy
Die Zerwartung Thoor, Jesse 1948 14 4 112 sad
Mean (SD) 12.88 2.50 78.35
(1.81) (1.31) (17.63)

Authors addresses
Maria Kraxenberger Winfried Menninghaus
Department for Language and Literature Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics
Grneburgweg 14, 60322 Grneburgweg 14, 60322
Frankfurt/Main Frankfurt am Main
Germany
w.m@aesthetics.mpg.de
maria.kraxenberger@gmail.com

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