Similarity of poetic rhythms with different amounts of semantic content‐stress ratings and pairwise similarity ratings

Abstract.— Two experiments are reported. In exp. 1 12 lines, taken from Swedish poems, were presented in written form. Exp. II concerned 12 “nonsense” lines metrically equivalent to the ones in exp. I and presented in the same way. Fourteen subjects made pairwise similiarity ratings and also rated stress of the syllables in each verse line. The intra‐as well as the interrater reliability turned out to be low in the similarity data and INDSCAL analysis did not suggest any interpretable multidimensional solutions. The ratings of syllabic stress, however, showed a very good correspondence to prosodic norms and meter. Moreover, the correlations between rated stress in the “poetic” lines and that in the “nonsense” lines were mostly around 0.90.