Rhythms of Speech and Language

Lars Meyer investigates the neurobiology of language. He is a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, and a researcher at the Clinic for Phoniatrics and Pedaudiology, University Hospital Münster. His doctoral work received the Otto Hahn Medal by the Max Planck Society. Antje Strauss is a cognitive neuroscientist interested in speech processing. She received her Ph.D. at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, and has completed post-doctoral fellowships in Grenoble and Geneva. She currently conducts research at the University of Konstanz.

• Part I. The Physiology of Rhythm: 1. Body-grounded speech rhythm: ubiquitous interactions between speech, breathing and limb movements; 2. Jaw opening patterns and their correspondence with syllable stress patterns; 3. Region-specific endogenous brain rhythms and their role for speech and language; 4. The sensorimotor account of multimodal prosody; 5. Evaluating neural tracking of rhythmic information in speech: some caveats and challenges; 6. Speech rhythm in the perception-action-cycle; 7. A road to better understanding of rhythms in speech using a comparative approach; Part II. Acoustic and Sublexical Rhythms: 8. A polychromatic portrait of speech rhythm; 9. Rhythms of phones, syllables, and words in connected speech; 10. Linguistic factors affecting amplitude modulation spectra; 11. The P-center effect and the domain of beat perception in speech; 12. Adaptive pacing in word segmentation and the vowel-onset paced syllable inference model; 13. Beyond acoustics: Capacity limitations of linguistic levels; 14. Rhythm is a timescale; Part III. Rhythm in Prosody and at the Prosody–Syntax Interface: 15. Intonation units: prosodic regularity in spontaneous speech as a window onto cognitive dynamics; 16. Phrasal rhythmicity and the sources of temporal intermittency in speech; 17. Prosody vs. syntax, or prosody and syntax?: evaluating accounts of delta-band tracking; 18.Cognitive and neural constraints on timing and rhythm in language; 19. Shaping rhythm to keep balance: the structural implications of temporal modulation; 20. The hierarchical temporal structure of prosody; 21. Preserving prosody in temporal distortions of speech; 22. Rhythmic alternation and balance: a new metric; Part IV. Diversity of Rhythm from Oral Speech to Music: 23. Time, cohesion, style: rhythm formants in oral narrative; 24. Time to pop the cork?: The cork exercise and its effects on rhythm and melody in a public speaker's presentation task; 25. Rhythmic stimulation of linguistic performance: a common structure?; 26. Characterizing rhythmic regularity in speech and song; 27. Beats in time across music and language; 28. Shared mechanisms for the processing of rhythm in music and speech; 29. Interaction phonology: rhythmic co-ordination as scaffold for communicative alignment; Part V. Rhythm across Languages: 30. Duration-based and acoustic speech rhythm metrics; 31. The role of prosodic durational variation in the temporal coordination of utterances; 32. Individual and language differences in rhythm grouping preferences: The iambic-trochaic law revisited; 33. Cross-linguistic consistency of speech rhythms and pending questions: evidence from bilingual and second language speakers; 34. Revisiting rhythm in romance languages; Part VI. Rhythm in Language Acquisition: 35. Rhythm and language acquisition: a temporal sampling perspective; 36. Neural and behavioural rhythmic tracking during language acquisition: findings, methods, and outstanding issues; 37. Maturational constraints on tracking of temporal attention in infant language acquisition; 38. Rhythmic structure in infant-directed communication; 39. Prosody as an entry point into language structure in early language acquisition; 40. Acquisition of similar versus different speech rhythmic class; 41. Speech rhythms and pupil size; Part VI. Rhythm in Speech and Language Disabilities: 42. Speech rhythm in hearing loss and cochlear implant listening; 43. Melodic intonation therapy: the ingredients that make it work; 44. Phonetic adaptation and rhythmic entrainment in interactive language use: neural mechanisms and evidence from individuals with neurological disorders; 45. Rhythmic processes in stuttering and Parkinson's disease; 46. Speech rhythm in stuttering: perception and production; 47. Conversational rhythmic-prosodic entrainment in autism.