Rhythm Comes, Rhythm Goes: Short-Term Periodicity of Prosodic Phrasing

Abstract

Speech is perceived as a sequence of meaningful units. Speech prosody helps to delimit these units through pauses and acoustic modulations of pitch, amplitude and speech rate. These prosodic boundaries subdivide utterances into prosodic phrases. To be understood, prosodic phrases must obey cognitive and neurobiological constraints on the side of the listener. In particular, the neurobiological substrates of speech processing have been argued to operate periodically—with one electrophysiological processing cycle being devoted to the processing of one segment of the speech stream. We hypothesized that when processing is periodic, prosodic phrases should show periodicity as well. We investigated the periodicity of prosodic phrases in a corpus of radio news that has been manually annotated for full intonational and intermediate phrases by human experts. We find that sequences of 2 to 5 intermediate phrases are periodic at 0.8 to 1.6 Hertz within their superordinate intonation phrase. Across utterances, the exact duration of intermediate phrases fluctuates with the duration of superordinate intonation phrases, pointing to a dependence of prosodic time scales. Our findings provide evidence of short-term periodicity of prosodic phrasing within a highly specific range. While the determinants of periodicity are unknown, the results are compatible with an association between elec- trophysiological processing time scales and the phonological rhythms of language as such. This is a further step towards closing the gaps between the neurobiology of language, psycholinguistics, and linguistic description.

Local Temporal Regularities in Child-Directed Speech in Spanish

“…Our findings concerning rhythmicity are also in line with previous adult studies that have contextualized the temporal regularities of speech within local (utterance level) stress patterns (Arvaniti, 2009;Nolan & Jeon, 2014;Tilsen & Arvaniti, 2013). Indeed, there is recent evidence for local prosodic stress regularities in ADS in different languages (e.g., Inbar et al, 2020;Stehwien & Meyer, 2021). The slower syllable rate in CDS relative to ADS is also of relevance when comparing temporal statistics.…”

“…In the same vein, Inbar et al, (2020) found that prosodic units (termed 'intonation units' in their study) produced by adult speakers appear at a roughly constant rate of ~1 Hz. Interestingly, Stehwien and Meyer (2021) analyzed an annotated corpus of radio newscasts in German to show that the prosody of intonational phrases (mapping onto utterances) determined the periodicity of their nested subordinate phrases, suggesting that prosody could have a determining role in shaping the local temporal regularities of adult-directed speech. Overall, the evidence suggests that there is a close overlap between the rhythms of quasi-regular speech units such as stressed syllables and syllables and the timescales at which neurophysiological mechanisms operate to subserve their processing (see Poeppel & Assaneo, 2020 for a comprehensive review on the rhythms of speech production and perception).…”

Acoustically Driven Cortical δ Oscillations Underpin Prosodic Chunking

“…At the phrase level, phrase rhythm can affect segmentation ( Gee and Grosjean, 1983 ; Martin, 2015 ; Deniz and Fodor, 2019 ; Hilton and Goldwater, 2020 ). There have been various studies aiming to quantify phrase length and rhythmicity ( Clifton et al, 2006 ; Breen, 2018 ; Deniz and Fodor, 2019 ), suggesting that typical intonational phrases are about 1 s in duration ( Auer et al, 1999 ; Inbar et al, 2020 ; Stehwien and Meyer, 2021 ). More specifically, the duration of intonational phrases spans a range between ∼0.5 and 1 s in English (slightly faster in some other languages; Inbar et al, 2020 ; Stehwien and Meyer, 2021 ).…”

“…There have been various studies aiming to quantify phrase length and rhythmicity ( Clifton et al, 2006 ; Breen, 2018 ; Deniz and Fodor, 2019 ), suggesting that typical intonational phrases are about 1 s in duration ( Auer et al, 1999 ; Inbar et al, 2020 ; Stehwien and Meyer, 2021 ). More specifically, the duration of intonational phrases spans a range between ∼0.5 and 1 s in English (slightly faster in some other languages; Inbar et al, 2020 ; Stehwien and Meyer, 2021 ). Prosodic segmentation (here also termed “prosodic chunking”) is based on intonation units that contain specific prosodic cues (such as pauses or pitch contour), which can pace the information flow at the phrasal time scale ( Shattuck-Hufnagel and Turk, 1996 ; Inbar et al, 2020 ).…”

Auditory representations for long lasting sounds: Insights from event-related brain potentials and neural oscillations

“…Further, low gamma oscillations (⪆30 Hz) have been linked to phonemic processing (Giraud & Poeppel, 2012;Hyafil et al, 2015). More recently, a role of delta oscillations (0.5-2 Hz) in segmenting the input stream at the phrasal time scale has been discussed (Bonhage et al, 2017;Boucher et al, 2019;Ding et al, 2016;Keitel et al, 2018;Meyer et al, 2017;Rimmele et al, 2021;Stehwien & Meyer, 2021).…”