The perception of rhythm in language

[alice]

See what you make of this, if you haven't already seen it. It's quite provocative.

[xxx]

in writing, the spaces between words are enough
to produce the self-segmentation of the language flow...

unless you import natural languages,
it's hard to imagine how ambiguities can be avoided,
and whether they would paralyze the transmission of meaning...

conlangs, which are mostly silent languages,
have little data on their prosodies...
and tonic accents are often doubled by stereotyped syllables,
as in Esperanto...

in 3SDL, where the word limit is irrelevant
(I see it more as a one-word language),
I got around it with triple S equality (1Sense=1Sign=1Sound)...

and you, have you thought about it...

[Raphael]

Shouldn't this be in L&L?

[Travis B.]

Shouldn't this be in L&L?

Agreed - this is very much a topic for L&L.

[sasasha]

My gut reaction is that while this is generally correct, it is a little overblown, in that I’d wager that phrase-level pitch contour has at least as much to do with segmentation as rhythm.

[alice]

Shouldn't this be in L&L?

Agreed - this is very much a topic for L&L.

So I realised too not long after logging out, aaarrrggghhh.

But I think you might need to read the paper more closely; some of its points are quite subtle.

[bradrn]

I’m curious how many people noticed that this paper…

More: show

…is itself a great example of some prose in metric time? For it’s plain to see its rhythm is trochaic octameter, with the end of every sentence counting as a final rhyme.

(Obviously alice has, but anyone else? If you haven’t, don’t spoil it by expanding this post… just re-read the paper and you’ll work it out.)

[sasasha]

I’m curious how many people noticed that this paper…

More: show

…is itself a great example of some prose in metric time? For it’s plain to see its rhythm is trochaic octameter, with the end of every sentence counting as a final rhyme.

(Obviously alice has, but anyone else? If you haven’t, don’t spoil it by expanding this post… just re-read the paper and you’ll work it out.)

Ha! Brilliant.

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That I didn’t notice obviously adds weight to her own last point ‒ but... also, coincidentally, mine... Both rhythm and pitch contour are involved in ‘performing’ this ‘as verse’ vs as prose.

[bradrn]

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Aww, pity, I got it wrong! The follow-up paper identifies the metre as iambic, not trochaic.

Incidentally, if anyone feels in the mood for more poetry, I can refer them to the classic reference on dihalobenzene reactions — or any of the others in this vein.

Or, for that matter, The 13 Clocks is a whole story written in precisely this style. (And one which I just read, as it happens, which probably explains why I caught on to the current paper so quickly.)

[sasasha]

The 13 Clocks

This is possibly my favourite book! I have a suite of piano pieces I wrote inspired by it. Sadly largely unnotated and unfinished.

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I just found a draft recording I did of it nearly 10 years ago. I reallllly need to finish this piece... If anyone wants some escapism, and faulty but well-meaning piano playing, it’s here.

It’s a wonderful book.

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Incidentally my partner noticed the rhyme in the article straight away. They’re a primary school teacher and they put it down to that; they said they expected their kids would notice immediately, partly due to commonly being exposed to this kind of metre, partly due to the suggestion that there was something to notice about it.

[Ketsuban]

I hate this (/pos) because I think it has the same metric structure as the bridge in "Weird" Al Yankovic's Your Horoscope For Today and can't help but start singing it in my head.

[Torco]

I had noticed that the prose of it was to my mind unusual yet i had not quite noticed it till it was pointed out.

I have the feeling that strong and clear segmentation might be an artifact of writing as opposed to something speakers "are doing under the hood", mostly cause people who are otherwise able to speak normally and functionally segment "incorrectly" in writing all the time. just today I read someone say "van hacer abuelos" in a message addressed to people who were going to be grampas ([ustedes] van a ser abuelos). that being said, stress and rhythm are totally essential to decode speaking by ear.

[sasasha]

I have the feeling that strong and clear segmentation might be an artifact of writing as opposed to something speakers "are doing under the hood", mostly cause people who are otherwise able to speak normally and functionally segment "incorrectly" in writing all the time. just today I read someone say "van hacer abuelos" in a message addressed to people who were going to be grampas ([ustedes] van a ser abuelos). that being said, stress and rhythm are totally essential to decode speaking by ear.

I think you’re probably right. The term segmenting is perhaps a bit skewed to the expression of this phenomenon as it pertains to reading and writing. In parsing speech, there may well be no requirement for any neural process to segment anything per se, but rather... like... allow relevant individual neurones/neural areas which store recognition of items (however large) to be activated, by likeness or relationship according to a set of common rules, to the stimulus of speech.

Not knowing anything about that really I had better stop there!

Does anyone know of studies which aim to synthesise just the pitch content of English speech, or just its rhythmic content, and test for intelligibility?

Via vague awareness of e.g. whistling languages I’m aware that some languages are said to be significantly parseable from pitch alone, but I don’t know if that holds for English. And I’d be surprised if it did for, say, Finnish...

[Torco]

Does anyone know of studies which aim to synthesise just the pitch content of English speech, or just its rhythmic content, and test for intelligibility?

i don't, but i do know we do this all the time. like, when the gf is telling you a story and you're brushing your teeth so you want to ask "is she okay?" but you say "mhmhm" with the melody of is she okay.
not that melody tho

[alice]

I had noticed that the prose of it was to my mind unusual yet i had not quite noticed it till it was pointed out.

For those of you who are wondering, this was my reaction too. Some of the idioms (e.g. "makes segmenting speech a breeze") struck me as peculiar, but I put that down to the fact this is not unusual for linguistic papers.

The (non-linguist) friend who showed it to me worked it out very quickly, btw.

[bradrn]

I had noticed that the prose of it was to my mind unusual yet i had not quite noticed it till it was pointed out.

For those of you who are wondering, this was my reaction too. Some of the idioms (e.g. "makes segmenting speech a breeze") struck me as peculiar, but I put that down to the fact this is not unusual for linguistic papers.

I got all the way to ‘manner iron-cast’ before I realised there was something going on here.