Listening to Limericks: A Pupillometry Investigation of Perceivers’ Expectancy

Christoph Scheepers; Sibylle  Mohr; Martin H. Fischer; Andrew M. Roberts

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0074986

Listening to Limericks: A Pupillometry Investigation of Perceivers’ Expectancy

Christoph Scheepers (Lead / Corresponding author), Sibylle Mohr, Martin H. Fischer, Andrew M. Roberts

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33 Citations (Scopus)

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Abstract

What features of a poem make it captivating, and which cognitive mechanisms are sensitive to these features? We addressed these questions experimentally by measuring pupillary responses of 40 participants who listened to a series of Limericks. The Limericks ended with either a semantic, syntactic, rhyme or metric violation. Compared to a control condition without violations, only the rhyme violation condition induced a reliable pupillary response. An anomaly-rating study on the same stimuli showed that all violations were reliably detectable relative to the control condition, but the anomaly induced by rhyme violations was perceived as most severe. Together, our data suggest that rhyme violations in Limericks may
induce an emotional response beyond mere anomaly detection.

Original language	English
Article number	e74986
Pages (from-to)	1-8
Number of pages	8
Journal	PLoS ONE
Volume	8
Issue number	9
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0074986
Publication status	Published - 23 Sept 2013

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10.1371/journal.pone.0074986Licence: CC BY

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Copyright: © 2013 Scheepers et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Final published version, 796 KBLicence: CC BY

Cite this

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Listening to Limericks: A Pupillometry Investigation of Perceivers’ Expectancy

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