Integration of phonetic and graphic features in poetic text categorization judgements

The experiments reported in this paper deal with the relationship between specific formal textual features, i.e. graphic and phonetic information, and the reader's literary educational background in the categorization of poetic texts. In two experiments, the research method of Information Integration Theory was employed in order to test two hypotheses relating to the radical conventionalist and traditional positions on the role of specific formal textual features in the categorization of poetic texts. Twenty subjects from expert or novice literary reading experience backgrounds were, in two experiments, required to rate two parallel sets of graphically and phonetically manipulated poems. The results reveal that subjects are sensitive to the manipulations of graphic and phonetic information and use the same additive information integration rule in making poetic text categorization judgements. The expert literary readers were found to assign significantly higher ratings to all versions of the manipulated poems than the novice readers.

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