A linguistic correlate of sentential rhythmic patterns.

Rhythmic organization in speech processing.

“…The present experiments show fairly directly that rhythmic organization also operates for speech material without sentential grammatic structure and independently of the lexical semantic information carried by content words. These studies do not contradict Hamill's (1976) results. Rather, in the spirit of Lashley's (1951) position, they show that rhythmic organization operates at other hierarchical levels as well.…”

“…Indirect evidence for the connection of rhythm and speech processing comes from Robinson and Solomon (1974), who showed that nonspeech rhythmic patterns are processed by the same hemisphere that processes speech. Recently, Hamill (1976) suggested a relation between the rhythmic pattern of 83 grammatical strings and subjects' selections of content or function words for positions in the string. Subjects heard pure tone sequences patterned by long and short pulses.…”

Eye-Movement Rhythmicity and Reading Comprehension

“…This substratum may particularly enhance memory for comprehension, as suggested by the earlier work of Neisser (1967) and Robinson. The structural task variable influences found here further suggest that rhythm may anticipate surface and deep structure cues about important lexical items, as Brown and Miron (1971) and Hamill (1976) indicated. The present results also indicate that for nondisabled adult readers, this rhythmic template may no longer be essential when they are reading easy material.…”

“…Robinson and Solomon (1974) found that "rhythmic patterns are the only nonspeech auditory stimuli to share the processing of the left hemisphere with speech" (p. 508). Martin (1972) found that rhythmical accents hierarchically organize structural elements and enhance anticipation; and Hamill (1976) suggested that "the rhythmic schema of an utterance contains information which delimits its syntactic form" (p. 71). Hamill's results supported "a word distribution hypothesis wherein high-information (content) words occupy longer duration positions in temporal patterns than do low-information (function) words" (p. 78), suggesting that rhythm restricts word function in a sentence.…”

“…Moreover, eye movements (Rayner, 1978) suggest that articles are often skipped. Could this be the oculomuscular equivalent of Hamill's (1976) intonational "word distribution hypothesis" (p. 71)?…”