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…
Drifting through Basic Subprocesses of Reading: A Hierarchical Diffusion Model Analysis of Age Effects on Visual Word Recognition
International audience; Reading is one of the most popular leisure activities and it is routinely performed by most individuals even in old age. Successful reading enables older people to master and actively participate in everyday life and maintain functional independence. Yet, reading comprises a multitude of subprocesses and it is undoubtedly one of the most complex accomplishments of the human brain. Not surprisingly, findings of age-related effects on word recognition and reading have been partly contradictory and are often confined to only one of four central reading subprocesses, i.e., sublexical, orthographic, phonological and lexico-semantic processing. The aim of the present study…