Linguistic syncopation: Meter-syntax alignment affects sentence comprehension and sensorimotor synchronization

Hilton, Courtney B.; Goldwater, Micah B.

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104880

Cited by 13 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 123 publications

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“…However, another alternative and more likely interpretation would be that syntactic predictions, enabled by the meaningful regular syllables, may be a factor as important as phonetic structure for extracting, updating, and maintaining a leading metrical grid, because unlike the tack-syllables the regular syllables combine to form words and phrases. Thus, effects found for tack-syllables could also be explained by a tack induced weakening of the ongoing syntactic prediction process, disrupting the syntax-aligned metrical prediction of phrasal stress, as suggested by Hilton and Goldwater (2021). Thus, if there are fewer syntactic predictions possible, or non at all, because a line contains multiple meaningless tacks, then it is possible that there is less of a boost to metrical processing from these non-syntactic bottom-up cues, which in turn could have led readers' performance to become more dependent on the top-down projection of the main metrical grid.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

What a difference a syllable makes—Rhythmic reading of poetry

Beck

Konieczny

2023

Front. Psychol.

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In reading conventional poems aloud, the rhythmic experience is coupled with the projection of meter, enabling the prediction of subsequent input. However, it is unclear how top-down and bottom-up processes interact. If the rhythmicity in reading loud is governed by the top-down prediction of metric patterns of weak and strong stress, these should be projected also onto a randomly included, lexically meaningless syllable. If bottom-up information such as the phonetic quality of consecutive syllables plays a functional role in establishing a structured rhythm, the occurrence of the lexically meaningless syllable should affect reading and the number of these syllables in a metrical line should modulate this effect. To investigate this, we manipulated poems by replacing regular syllables at random positions with the syllable “tack”. Participants were instructed to read the poems aloud and their voice was recorded during the reading. At the syllable level, we calculated the syllable onset interval (SOI) as a measure of articulation duration, as well as the mean syllable intensity. Both measures were supposed to operationalize how strongly a syllable was stressed. Results show that the average articulation duration of metrically strong regular syllables was longer than for weak syllables. This effect disappeared for “tacks”. Syllable intensities, on the other hand, captured metrical stress of “tacks” as well, but only for musically active participants. Additionally, we calculated the normalized pairwise variability index (nPVI) for each line as an indicator for rhythmic contrast, i.e., the alternation between long and short, as well as louder and quieter syllables, to estimate the influence of “tacks” on reading rhythm. For SOI the nPVI revealed a clear negative effect: When “tacks” occurred, lines appeared to be read less altering, and this effect was proportional to the number of tacks per line. For intensity, however, the nPVI did not capture significant effects. Results suggests that top-down prediction does not always suffice to maintain a rhythmic gestalt across a series of syllables that carry little bottom-up prosodic information. Instead, the constant integration of sufficiently varying bottom-up information appears necessary to maintain a stable metrical pattern prediction.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

What a difference a syllable makes—Rhythmic reading of poetry

Beck

Konieczny

2023

Front. Psychol.

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“…The speech envelope spectrum (ENV) represents temporal regularities correlating to rhythmic properties of the signal (Tilsen and Johnson, 2008 ; Poeppel and Assaneo, 2020 ; Hilton and Goldwater, 2021 ). For each vocalization sample, the vocalic energy amplitude envelope was first derived.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, the power of rhythm is clear: Rhythm supports language acquisition from the start and continues to support language processing into adulthood (Gleitman and Wanner, 1982 ; Morgan and Demuth, 1996 ; Hilton and Goldwater, 2021 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rhythm May Be Key to Linking Language and Cognition in Young Infants: Evidence From Machine Learning

2022

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Rhythm is key to language acquisition. Across languages, rhythmic features highlight fundamental linguistic elements of the sound stream and structural relations among them. A sensitivity to rhythmic features, which begins in utero, is evident at birth. What is less clear is whether rhythm supports infants' earliest links between language and cognition. Prior evidence has documented that for infants as young as 3 and 4 months, listening to their native language (English) supports the core cognitive capacity of object categorization. This precocious link is initially part of a broader template: listening to a non-native language from the same rhythmic class as (e.g., German, but not Cantonese) and to vocalizations of non-human primates (e.g., lemur, Eulemur macaco flavifrons, but not birds e.g., zebra-finches, Taeniopygia guttata) provide English-acquiring infants the same cognitive advantage as does listening to their native language. Here, we implement a machine-learning (ML) approach to ask whether there are acoustic properties, available on the surface of these vocalizations, that permit infants' to identify which vocalizations are candidate links to cognition. We provided the model with a robust sample of vocalizations that, from the vantage point of English-acquiring 4-month-olds, either support object categorization (English, German, lemur vocalizations) or fail to do so (Cantonese, zebra-finch vocalizations). We assess (a) whether supervised ML classification models can distinguish those vocalizations that support cognition from those that do not, and (b) which class(es) of acoustic features (including rhythmic, spectral envelope, and pitch features) best support that classification. Our analysis reveals that principal components derived from rhythm-relevant acoustic features were among the most robust in supporting the classification. Classifications performed using temporal envelope components were also robust. These new findings provide in principle evidence that infants' earliest links between vocalizations and cognition may be subserved by their perceptual sensitivity to rhythmic and spectral elements available on the surface of these vocalizations, and that these may guide infants' identification of candidate links to cognition.

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“…Speech rhythm is the temporal structure of auditory events that occur across time [ 1 , 2 ]. As rhythm is consistently aligned with the speech structure, it is useful for segmenting speech [ 3 , 4 , 5 ], enhancing linguistic processing when speech rhythm is predictable [ 1 , 6 ], and facilitating speech production in some cases [ 7 , 8 ]. Over the last decade, researchers have explored the cognitive brain mechanisms that underlie speech rhythmic structure.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Theta Band (4–8 Hz) Oscillations Reflect Online Processing of Rhythm in Speech Production

Yan

Zhang

2022

Brain Sciences

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How speech prosody is processed in the brain during language production remains an unsolved issue. The present work used the phrase-recall paradigm to analyze brain oscillation underpinning rhythmic processing in speech production. Participants were told to recall target speeches aloud consisting of verb–noun pairings with a common (e.g., [2+2], the numbers in brackets represent the number of syllables) or uncommon (e.g., [1+3]) rhythmic pattern. Target speeches were preceded by rhythmic musical patterns, either congruent or incongruent, created by using pure tones at various temporal intervals. Electroencephalogram signals were recorded throughout the experiment. Behavioral results in 2+2 target speeches showed a rhythmic priming effect when comparing congruent and incongruent conditions. Cerebral-acoustic coherence analysis showed that neural activities synchronized with the rhythmic patterns of primes. Furthermore, target phrases that had congruent rhythmic patterns with a prime rhythm were associated with increased theta-band (4–8 Hz) activity in the time window of 400–800 ms in both the 2+2 and 1+3 target conditions. These findings suggest that rhythmic patterns can be processed online. Neural activities synchronize with the rhythmic input and speakers create an abstract rhythmic pattern before and during articulation in speech production.

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Linguistic syncopation: Meter-syntax alignment affects sentence comprehension and sensorimotor synchronization

Cited by 13 publications

References 123 publications

What a difference a syllable makes—Rhythmic reading of poetry

What a difference a syllable makes—Rhythmic reading of poetry

Rhythm May Be Key to Linking Language and Cognition in Young Infants: Evidence From Machine Learning

Theta Band (4–8 Hz) Oscillations Reflect Online Processing of Rhythm in Speech Production

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