Adaptation and Perception

Rhetoric, Neurocognitive Poetics, and the Aesthetics of Adaptation

Rhetorical effects in speech and writing have a great strategic importance in achieving the communicative end of being persuasive: they are key in the exertion of power through language. Persuasion occurs by cognitive-affective stimulation, relying on specific psychosomatic perceptual patterns which are used on all levels of speech reception in cultural and political contexts. This makes rhetorically conspicuous texts efficient as stimulus material for empirical research into neurocognitive modeling of how poetic texts are read. Adaptations as revisitations of prior works share with the rhetorical repertoire of repetition similar cognitive-affective properties, because both function via rec…

Review of Willems (2015): Cognitive Neuroscience of Natural Language Use