Sound Symbolism

Problem Solving

But problem solving -- or at least several major aspects of it -- is an integral part of all complex human activities and the affective response to poetic sound patterning is no exception. It would be difficult to imagine a case in which a reader's prior encounters with poetic sound patterning -- their experience in the classroom or otherwise -- never came into play in their response to a poem at hand. Problem solving is a process by which prior prior experiences (and knowledge inferred from them) are brought to bear in new experiences. The fact that problem solving can be unconscious or automatic only makes it more difficult to rule out of even the most casual and "unproblematical" reading contexts. Consider those instances, even in "recreational" reading, where we encounter minor incongruences in poetic form -- at these points, don't we engage in a little low-level, on-the-spot problem solving? Explicit problem solving (involving relatively intense analysis) would certainly be impossible to rule out in poems written in philosophical or intellectual modes, and in poems that contain ironic or otherwise self-conscious uses of conventional poetic form. But cognitive science has also recently begun to decouple, with studies on the role of emotion in problem solving, problem solving from cold artificiality. As such studies become more substantial, the connections between problem solving and emotion -- and the connections between problem solving and the experience of poetry -- will become clearer. Indeed, problem solving is the primary capacity involved in all forms of play (including parodies, chess, even scholarly close reading), all activities with which emotions can be strongly connected.

Using TACT to Study Visual vs. Aural Reception

Two subject groups were presented with the same poem, Rita Dove's "Teach Us to Number Our Days" (1993). The eight subjects -- four in each group -- were graduate or postgraduate members of the University of Toronto English or Comparative Literature Departments. All had relatively high levels of experience with poetry in both creative and academic contexts. None had encountered the poem before. The visual CRO group was presented with the poem on paper. The aural CRO group listened to the poem recorded on tape. For comparison, the two groups of subjects were required to perform an identical set of response tasks. I attempted to curtail aural reception in the visual group by instructing them not to mouth (subvocalize) or recite the words while reading.

After two passes through the poem, both groups answered a series of questions which tested their memory for phonemic collocate associations. Phonemic collocates are phonemes that tend to occur near to each other. TACT was used to analyze a phonemic transcription of the poem and obtain the collocation data. TACT was able to indicate, as it were, the strengths of association between different phonemes in the poem. For any given phoneme, TACT could indicate which other phonemes were most likely to be found near it and which other phonemes were most likely not to be found near it. [12] I used TACT to select three phonemes from the poem that had strong collocates -- whether the collocation was one of strong "attraction" or "repulsion". As can be seen in Table 1 below, for each selected phoneme, two strong/weak pairs of collocates were chosen (one pair consisted of vowel collocates, the other, of consonants).

After their two passes through the poem, subjects were presented with each of the selected phonemes in separate questions. For each selected phoneme they were asked to consider one strong/weak pair of collocate phonemes (vowels) and to decide which collocate phoneme they felt was more strongly associated with the selected phoneme. In a subsequent question, subjects considered the same selected phoneme but chose between the other strong/weak pair of collocate phonemes (consonants). This procedure was repeated with the remaining two selected phonemes. For each question, the instructions reminded the subjects that their collocation decisions were to be based on what they felt to be the association between phonemes in the poem rather than between phonemes in general. For each answer, subjects rated their confidence in their decision. The following is a sample question:

Consider the phoneme /ee/ as in eat or jeep. Of the two phonemes below, /ee/ is more strongly associated with
/ey/ as in hate or wait

/u/ as in nut

Rate your confidence in your answer: 1 2 3 4 5 (1 = no confidence; 5 = practically certain)

While there is a great deal of variation within the scores and ratings for each of the test phonemes, the visual group was consistently more accurate than the aural group. The averages confirm this pattern. This would seem to suggest that memory for phonemic collocates is better in visual rather than aural reception. Stronger generalizations are plausible but will not be conclusive until further testing is completed. Does differential memory for phonemic collocates indicate a differential configuration of linguistic memory in a visual CRO? Why would this be so? Questions such as these will have to wait, for two main reasons. First, the phonemic collocate test is an as yet not investigated methodology. [13] More importantly, though, the subject sample of my experiment is too small to be confident that the differences between subject groups would replicate. Nonetheless, the findings of this trial are quite suggestive and warrant further and more substantive testing using or extending this methodology and theoretical framework. Similar tests and measures could be developed to study the involvement of other cognitive systems (sound symbolism, music cognition, problem solving) that are active in the response to sound patterning in poetic language. This kind of study would help us to understand better the differences between the visual and aural reception of poetic language.

The Path Ahead: Literary Computing and Literary Reception

Whether we are studying the reception of poetic language [15] or plot structure, the point remains that literary computing shouldn't be limited to accounts or analyses of regularities or linguistic structures in texts. Those accounts and analyses can be used to study different acts of reception. If a program such as TACT can give us a map, as it were, of where all the features or structures in a text occur, why not use that map to examine the routes that different acts of reading (or CROs) will trace over it? Texts, after all, are not just sites of authorship but also sites of multiple and different readings.

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Notes

[9] See Hinton, Nichols & Ohala 1994.

[10] Ivan Fonagy researched universal phonological symbolism in these categories during the 1970s. Reuven Tsur discusses these in relation to cognitive science (1992).

[11] Visual or "silent" reading is unlikely to be purely visual -- utterly devoid of aural processing. The visual processing of alphabetic script is likely to involve access to aural processing centres (see Parkin 1996: Chapters 7, 8). Cognitive neuropsychological evidence does suggest, however, that alphabetic script can be "read" for meaning without access to aural processing. The evidence comes from testing of individuals (stroke victims with brain lesions or the congenitally deaf) in whose brains the link between graphic and aural processing systems is blocked. But no evidence exists to show that visual language processing in "normal" individuals can exclude -- by choice, as it were -- access to aural processing. This means that even the most visual poetries (e.g. concrete poetry) are likely to involve some form of "hearing" simply because all language processing includes some access to aural processing centres. Further arguments for the aurality of "silent reading" can be made using research on subvocalization.

[12] The measure TACT uses to determine collocate strengths is a Z-score. A Z-score is a standard measure of the unlikelihood that a collocation is purely random. The higher above or below zero the score, the less random the collocation relationship.

[13] The phonemic collocate task may privilege visual reception. Why? One possible explanation is that visuality in poetry may be like literacy in general (Olson 1994): it encourages metapoetic conceptualization. This makes it easier to perform what is essentially an abstract, problem solving task: accessing an abstract representation of the poem in memory and searching it for relationships in its structure. A "phoneme" is itself an abstraction of language (as is an alphabet). But the privileging of visual reception in the phonemic collocate task may also be explained by considering how the oral presentation of poem tends to discount the listener's own sense of "voice", thus implicating less effectively in the listener the affective memories or metaphors upon which phonetic response and memory may be based.

[14] TACT, for example, can do much more than analyze phonemic collocates. My analyses of the phonemic transcription of the poem using TACT yielded other significant patterns which were not incorporated into the test questions. Beyond its abilities to search out formal sound patterns such as alliteration and rhyme, TACT, for instance, was able to locate unusual phoneme concentrations in specific lines. TACT also includes a program that finds full and partial anagrams -- two words being anagrams of each other if they contain the same set of letters in different combinations. Orthographic anagrams, as with sight rhymes, are aspects of poetic form that are likely to be purely visual and thus insignificant in the aural CRO. More interesting, though, are phonemic anagrams -- such as "eat" and "tea". To what extent might phonemic anagrams at the syllabic level be significant in the response to poetic sound patterning? Would they be more significant in the aural or the visual CRO? TACT could generate thorough lists of all these and other patterns for testing.

[15] TACT is only one of several promising technologies in the study of the reception of poetic language. The continuing development of automated metrical scansion (e.g. Robey 1993, Beaudouin 1996) and phonological transcription software (see Beaudouin 1996) will greatly extend such study.