[An] international research team theorized that the constrained structure of poetry serves as a mental template that allows readers and listeners to group creative poetic language into coherent meanings.
In order to test their hypothesis, the team focused on a genre of ancient Chinese poetry called Jueju, which has a highly constrained style. They generated artificial poems using a recurrent neural network so they could present novel Jueju poems to their participants, while controlling the poetic content.
Nearly eighty thousand ancient poems written over the course of five Chinese dynasties were fed into the neural network model, which then learned to create artificial poems based on the Jueju form.
The researchers synthesized each poem into a speech stream, removing the pauses, intonation, and other prosodic cues that a human speaker would produce, so that listeners had to rely on their knowledge of poetic structures in order to parse the stream.
Native Chinese speakers then listened to the artificial speech streams in an MEG[*] scanner, while the researchers aimed to detect neural signatures in the participants' brains that corresponded to the poetic structure. And indeed, the scientists discovered a brain rhythm of around 0.67 Hertz corresponding to the line structure of Jueju.
Even though the modern Chinese listeners were hearing each "pseudo ancient" poem for the first time and could not fully understand every phrase in the poems, they recognized the highly constrained structure and then actively grouped the poetic speech stream into lines according to their prior knowledge of Jueju. When the participants listened to the same poem for the second time, their brains had learned the structure, which allowed them to predict the forthcoming lines.
This study suggests that a constrained formal and conceptual structure provides a poetic temporal frame for listeners to group semantic units as intended by the poets and even to anticipate them. It indicates that not just poetic language, but the interplay of predictable forms and unpredictable contents are essential to the aesthetic experience of poems.
[*] MEG: Magnetoencephalography.
Journal Reference: Xiangbin Teng, Min Ma, Jinbiao Yang, Stefan Blohm, Qing Cai, Xing Tian. "Constrained Structure of Ancient Chinese Poetry Facilitates Speech Content Grouping", Current Biology (2020) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.01.059
Sure makes sense to me. At the simplest level, imagine reading this story as just a stream of letters with no capitalization, no punctuation, and no spacing between words, sentences, or paragraphs! Similarly, programmers rarely deal with just a stream of characters. One of the first things I do is look for patterns in my input data. I then consider data structures — such as a list, tree, array, or hash — that I can use to organize the information. Upon gathering and organizing that data, the information it contains is much easier to process and analyze. See, also, Niklaus Wirth's highly influential book: Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs.
Further, as an outstanding example of how meter and rhyme can convey meaning that would otherwise be intractable, I offer you The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité. A couple verses help make this clear:
Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
Tear in eye, your dress you'll tear;
Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.[...] The Chaos represents a virtuoso feat of composition, a mammoth catalogue of about 800 of the most notorious irregularities of traditional English orthography, skilfully versified (if with a few awkward lines) into couplets with alternating feminine and masculine rhymes.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2020, @01:05AM (1 child)
I'm not sure the researchers thought this one through. Once they have perfected their neural network based artificial Chinamen, what will keep them from taking our jobs? The last thing we need is millions of unemployed American poets roaming the streets.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday April 20 2020, @12:39PM
Don't worry, just as long as no one creates AI equivalents of Dick Nixon and Bill Clinton we're fine. It's not like China stole those jobs; said jobs were *given* to them.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday April 20 2020, @01:17AM (1 child)
Anybody know the rest? [youtu.be]
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2020, @07:10PM
There was a young lady from Bude,
Who went for a swim in the lake.
A man in a punt stuck an oar up her nose,
And said "It's very dangerous to swim in here,"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2020, @01:30AM (1 child)
Chinese writing only really started being a transcription of speech about a hundred years ago. Before, Chinese was written in highly regulated forms, of which the poetry of the Song and Tang dynasties are specific forms that have known rules. Combine that with the spoken language being Middle Chinese, and the separate characters vocalized in a completely different manner than they are today.
All that being said, Chinese poetry is recited in this time using modern pronunciation. Not only is understanding lost due to the different grammar, but rhythm and rhyme have changed because of the different pronunciations. You need instruction in school to appreciate its technical characteristics.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2020, @09:31AM
(Score: 2, Insightful) by gumby on Monday April 20 2020, @02:41AM
Lewis Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark is a manual example of this in English. It’s full of made up words but dopuentonitsnstructure they sound like real words in English, and are inflected (declined or conjugated) in way that you would expect.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday April 20 2020, @10:17AM (5 children)
Poetry IS ABOUT putting things to memory.
Only later its degeneration has become a matter of mere lyrical expression.
Exactly like all music is dance music or degenerate music that doesn't make you dance.
Exactly like all sex is differentiation aimed at procreation or degenerate gonads mutual stimulation that doesn't procreate.
Note that degeneration is not meant as a moral judgement, it's a fact. But since I don't want to sound Politically Correct (that is, Incorrect), I can issue a moral judgement of the deniers of the facts, you put ideology over reality, you shouldn't do that.
Back to topic, Have you forgotten the meaning of oral tradition?
Have you noticed how it's easier to recall things if there is a logical path to them?
Have you noticed how the counting of the syllables, the rhyme, or the jewish repetitivity that Monty Python loved to make fun of, provide a logical path?
Not to detract from this particular work, but it's not research, it is more like verification.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 20 2020, @11:59AM (4 children)
IS != WAS.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2020, @12:03PM (3 children)
A misused toothbrush is still a toothbrush.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 20 2020, @01:44PM (2 children)
Here, we don't even have that. I wasn't claiming that poems aren't poems. But rather that something which WAS "ABOUT putting things to memory" no longer IS.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday April 22 2020, @02:06PM (1 child)
No, it is a molten toothbrush, the remains of a toothbrush.
The exception is when artifact X is used as Y by so many gens that X use is completely forgotten, so that the toothbrush becomes, say, the hamster cage cleaner. But this is not the case, as long as some historians and bots know.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 22 2020, @02:48PM
The remains of a toothbrush are no longer a toothbrush.
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Monday April 20 2020, @12:00PM
So the hypothesis of the existence of a “mental template” is considered proven by existence of brain waves at a certain frequency? What would constitute disproof? Did they read the material to the test subjects at different rates and observe a correlated change in frequency?