Finding the beat in German poetry: The role of meter, rhyme, and lexical content

Poetry is an artistic form of communication that may or may not contain meter, rhyme, or lexical content [1]. We examined how the temporal regularity of spoken German poetry varied as a function of these features. Using a beat tracker that was previously used to measure speech rate based on moments of acoustic stress [2], we examined how stress rate and variability were influenced by meter, rhyme, and lexical content during read poetry performances. Theories of cognitive fluency state that less cognitively demanding tasks are performed more quickly and less variably than more cognitively demanding tasks [3,4]. Based on the dynamic attending theory [5], we expected that meter increases cognitive fluency. Based on syntactic [6] and lexical [7] priming, we expected lexical words and rhyme to increase cognitive fluency. Therefore, it was hypothesized that the stress rate would be faster and less variable for: i) poems with an implied meter compared to those without, ii) rhyming poems compared to non-rhyming poems, and iii) poems with lexical words compared to pseudo-words.