PROCESSING OF VERSE AND PROSE: AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY

This article presents the results of four experiments on the processing of verse as compared to prose. We suggest that verse and prose are processed by the brain diffеrently. We can conclude that the most stable characteristics of verse known at present work to activate fi gurative thinking at the expense of logical and critical thinking. Our experiments show that various mistakes remain undetected in verse while they are easily detected in prose. This phenomenon is observed both in Russian verse (a fl ective language, syllabic-accentual and accetual systems of versifi cation in the XIX–XX centuries) and in Turkish verse (an agglutinative language, a syllabic system of versifi cation, different cultural traditions). The method used is self-paced reading. It is well known that if a reader detects a mistake he or she slows down at the fragment containing this mistake and/or immediately after it. In all experiments there was a statistically signifi cant diffеrence between the reading times for a text fragment with and without a mistake in prose,  while there were no statistically signifi cant diff erences in verse. Thus, certain mistakes remain undetected in verse and are easily detected in prose.