New study on rhetorical language use published in COGNITION

Experimentell modifizierte rhetorische Merkmale in Sprichwörtern.

The study investigated the effects of three experimentally modified rhetorical features. While they exerted an adverse effect on comprehensibility, they enhanced perveived beauty, succinctness (praegnanz), beauty and power of persuasion. The study proposes a model that allows to account for simultaneous fluency and disfluency effects exerted by the very same rhetorical features on different dimensions of language processing.

Original publication:

Menninghaus, W., Bohrn, I. C., Knoop, C. A., Kotz, S. A., Schlotz, W., & Jacobs, A. M. (2015). 
Rhetorical features facilitate prosodic processing while handicapping ease of semantic comprehension. 
Cognition, 143(0), 48-60. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2015.05.026

Contact:

Prof. Dr. Winfried Menninghaus
Director Department of Language and Literature
Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt am Main
+49 69 8300479-101