What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive?: The Poetic Mode of Speech Perception

Poets, academics and those who simply speak a language are subject to mysterious intuitions about the perceptual qualities and emotional symbolism of the sounds of speech. Such intuitions are Reuven Tsur’s point of departure in this investigation into the expressive effect of sound patterns. Research in recent decades has established two distinct types of aural perception - a non-speech mode, in which the acoustic signals are received in the manner of musical sounds or natural noises, and a speech mode, in which acoustic signals are excluded from awareness and only an abstract phonetic category is perceived. This study proposes a third type of speech perception, a poetic mode in which some part of the acoustic signal becomes accessible, however faintly, to consciousness.