In a series of studies we investigate the behavioral and physiological effects as well as the neural substrates of the numerous features of parallelistic diction (such as alliteration, meter, anaphora, and many others), as used in poetry, proverbs, humoristic verses, commercial ads and political slogans.

Menninghaus, W., Wagner, V., Wassiliwizky, E., Jacobsen, T., & Knoop, C. A. (2017). The emotional and aesthetic powers of parallelistic diction. Poetics, 63, 47–59.  doi:10.1016/j.poetic.2016.12.001

Kraxenberger, M., & Menninghaus, W. (2017). Affinity for Poetry and Aesthetic Appreciation of Joyful and Sad Poems. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, doi:10.1037/e556862006-015

Kraxenberger, M., & Menninghaus, W. (2016). Emotional effects of poetic phonology, word positioning and dominant stress peaks in poetry reading. Scientific Study of Literature, 6(2), 298–313.  doi:10.1075/ssol.6.2.06kra

Obermeier, C., Kotz, S. A., Jessen, S., Raettig, T., Koppenfels, M. von, & Menninghaus, W. (2016). Aesthetic appreciation of poetry correlates with ease of processing in event-related potentials. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 16(2), 362–373. doi:10.3758/s13415-015-0396-x

Knoop, C.A., Wagner, V., Jacobsen, T., & Menninghaus, W. (2016). Mapping the aesthetic space of literature "from below". Poetics. doi:10.1016/j.poetic.2016.02.001

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

Lehne, M., Engel, P., Rohrmeier, M., Menninghaus, W., Jacobs, A.M., Koelsch, S. (2015). Reading a Suspenseful Literary Text Activates Brain Areas Related to Social Cognition and Predictive Inference. PLoS ONE 10(5): e0124550. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0124550

Obermeier, C., Kotz, S. A., Jessen, S., Raettig, T., von Koppenfels, M., & Menninghaus, W. (2015). Aesthetic appreciation of poetry correlates with ease of processing in event-related potentials. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience. doi:10.3758/s13415-015-0396-x

Menninghaus, W., Bohrn, I. C., Altmann, U., Lubrich, O., & Jacobs, A. M. (2014). Sounds funny? Humor effects of phonological and prosodic figures of speech. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 8(1), 71–76. doi:10.1037/a0035309.

Obermeier, C., Menninghaus, W., von Koppenfels, M., Raettig T, Schmidt-Kassow, M., Otterbein, S. & Kotz, S. A. (2013). Aesthetic and emotional effects of meter and rhyme in poetry. Frontiers in Psychology, 4(10), 1–10. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00010