ABSTRACT
The present study, arising from the co-operation between poets and cognitive scientists, was designed as a pilot experiment to investigate the construction of literary meaning in the process of reading normative English-language, three-line haiku. To this end, readers’ eye movements were recorded, and (subjective) measures of memory for the read poems as well as subjective ratings of comprehension difficulty and understanding achieved were obtained. The results indicate that, out of the elements created by the poet and placed into a dynamic relationship, skillfully using such techniques as juxtaposition of images and caesura, or cut, the reader is invited to unravel the significance of the moment the poet presents, i.e., to reconstruct the experience/construct his/her own meaning. This interactive process between the poem and the reader gives rise to a characteristic pattern of saccades and fixations across the text, from which the type of haiku (context-action vs. juxtaposition) and the position of the cut (after line 1 vs. after line 2) can be predicted. Moreover, readers’ recognition memory was found to be associated with more explicit, conscious-recollective experience of having read a particular haiku if they had been able to understand the poem. This suggests that the ‘aha’ experience, the realization of the haiku’s ‘meaning gestalt’ in 250the reader’s mind, is important for memory consolidation and subsequent retrieval. Limitations of the present approach are discussed and directions for future work are outlined.
