READING MODE AS A COGNITIVE VARIABLE IN POETIC INTERPRETATION
Abstract
The study investigates the differences between reading and poetry silently and aloud, focusing on their influence on emotional engagement, interpretation, and perception of poetic language. The study is based on the theoretical approaches of cognitive poetics, linguistics, and reader’s response criticism, which consider reading as an active and dynamic process that is shaped by both textual features and reader-related factors. The empirical part of the study is based on a questionnaire-based experiment, in which 30 participants took part. The participants were divided into two groups: the group which was reading the poem silently and the group which was reading aloud. Participants were asked to read the same poetic text and complete a structured Likert-scale questionnaire, designed to evaluate their emotional reactions, aesthetic evaluations, cognitive processing, and interpretive responses. The results show that written mode influences the reader's perception of poetry. The reading aloud group demonstrated consistently higher scores from the point of view of emotional intensity and aesthetic evaluation, which claims explicit awareness of rhythm, rhyme and intonation enhances the affective dimension of poetic perception. At the same time, the results of the study show the high level of agreement in the interpretation of the poem's central theme across both groups, which highlights that the reading mode influences emotional engagement but not the main text comprehension. The study contributes to the field of empirical literary studies and cognitive poetics, highlighting the role of reading conditions in the formation of the perception of text. The results can be relevant for further research into multimodal reading processes and the interaction between sound, meaning and readers response.
Key words: poetry reading, silent reading, reading aloud, cognitive poetics, reader-response theory, emotional engagement, prosody, literary interpretation
