MAD Colloquium: Is rhythm relevant for natural speech perception?

Abstract

Rhythm plays a central role in many theories of language perception and acquisition. A number of studies have shown that rhythm can help listeners parse continuous speech into possible word candidates and discover how words combine into phrases and sentences. However, most of this evidence comes from studies where participants listen to rhythmic speech composed of phonemes, syllables, and words that are equal in length—regular rhythm that is not found in natural speech. Instead, I argue that evidence for speech rhythm must account for the temporal variability observed both across and within languages, and demonstrate that listeners can indeed perceive rhythm in natural speech. I present a novel method that measures spontaneous sensorimotor synchronization between natural speech and listeners' changes in pupil size. By tracking German-speaking adults' pupillary responses to Dutch, Polish, Italian, and French sentences, I show that listeners anticipate how the speech signal will unfold by tracking temporal regularities between syllables and lexical stress. I provide further support that speech rhythm could emerge from temporally varying speech signals by analyzing half a million utterances from over 100 languages, representing all major linguistic families, including languages from non-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) cultures.

Please contact garcia@leibniz-zas.de for Teams link!