The Temporal Prediction of Stress in Speech and Its Relation to Musical Beat Perception

Abstract

While rhythmic expectancies are thought to be at the base of beat perception in music, the extent to which stress patterns in speech are similarly represented and predicted during on-line language comprehension is debated. The temporal prediction of stress may be advantageous to speech processing, as stress patterns aid segmentation and mark new information in utterances. However, while linguistic stress patterns may be organized into hierarchical metrical structures similarly to musical meter, they do not typically present the same degree of periodicity. We review the theoretical background for the idea that stress patterns are predicted and address the following questions: First, what is the evidence that listeners can predict the temporal location of stress based on preceding rhythm? If they can, is it thanks to neural entrainment mechanisms similar to those utilized for musical beat perception? And lastly, what linguistic factors other than rhythm may account for the prediction of stress in natural speech? We conclude that while expectancies based on the periodic presentation of stresses are at play in some of the current literature, other processes are likely to affect the prediction of stress in more naturalistic, less isochronous speech. Specifically, aspects of prosody other than amplitude changes (e.g., intonation) as well as lexical, syntactic and information structural constraints on the realization of stress may all contribute to the probabilistic expectation of stress in speech.

How beat perception coopts motor neurophysiology

“…Our account of proto-action sequencing by striatum allows for the generation of non-isochronous beat patterns (discussed above) that could not be easily generated by homogeneous oscillators (though oscillator banks are capable of recognizing and discriminating such patterns [91] ). We also believe our account may generalize more easily than an oscillator account to describe the related phenomenon of non-isochronous rhythmic anticipation in speech [92][93][94] . The sequential nature of our neurophysiological account of the beat would be better described by the model of concatenated diffusion processes proposed and evidenced by…”

“…Notably, our account allows for a simpler model of the generation of non-isochronous beat patterns than is possible with homogenous oscillators. We also believe our account generalizes more easily than an oscillator account to non-isochronous rhythmic anticipation in speech [103–105]. The sequential nature of our neurophysiological account of the beat would be better described by the model of concatenated diffusion processes proposed and evidenced by Merchant& Averbeck [106].…”

Auditory Superiority for Perceiving the Beat Level but not the Measure Level in Music

“…Both music and speech contain periodic information nested at multiple timescales ranging from the tens of milliseconds to periods longer than a second (Ding et al, 2017;Kello, Dalla Bella, Médé, & Balasubramaniam, 2017). Our perception of these hierarchically-nested periodicities may underpin our ability to coordinate our behavior with music alone or with small and large groups, and may increase intelligibility in speech (Beier & Ferreira, 2018;Ding, Melloni, Zhang, Tian, & Poeppel, 2016;Riecke, Formisano, Sorger, Başkent, & Gaudrain, 2018). Many studies have demonstrated an advantage for the auditory system over the visual system for the perception and production of simple temporal intervals and even beat-based rhythms.…”

Temporal modulation in speech, music, and animal vocal communication: evidence of conserved function

“…Despite the complexity of the task, preverbal language learners readily acquire the ability to parse words from speech without explicit instruction. A long tradition of research suggests that temporal patterning plays a key role in this process, giving language learners a framework for when to expect word and phrase boundaries in a speech stream …”

“…A long tradition of research suggests that temporal patterning plays a key role in this process, giving language learners a framework for when to expect word and phrase boundaries in a speech stream. [41][42][43][44][45][46] Importantly, the kinds of temporal patterns that facilitate word and phrase parsing vary across languages. Groups of languages exhibiting similar temporal patterning are often referred to as belonging to the same "rhythmic class."…”