Words & Stuff

Yesterday, a friend pointed me to a brilliant three-page linguistics paper, published in 1994: “The perception of rhythm in language,” by psycholinguist Dr. Anne Cutler.

Here’s the beginning of part 1 of the text:

The orthography of English has a very simple basis for establishing where words in written texts begin and end: both before and also after every word are empty spaces and this demarcation surely helps the reader comprehend. In a spoken text, however, as presented to a hearer, such explicit segmentation cues are rarely to be found; little pauses after every single word might make things clearer, but the input is continuous—a running stream of sound.

In case it’s not clear to you why that’s brilliant, here’s a reformatted version of those sentences:

The orthography of English has a very simple basis

for establishing where words in written texts begin and end:

both before and also after every word are empty spaces

and this demarcation surely helps the reader comprehend.

In a spoken text, however, as presented to a hearer,

such explicit segmentation cues are rarely to be found;

little pauses after every single word might make things clearer,

but the input is continuous—a running stream of sound.

And yes, the entire three-page paper (except for the section headings) is written in that meter and rhyme scheme.

In short, it’s a poem that (a) scans really well, (b) makes a linguistic point, (c) is formatted as prose, and (d) goes on for for the equivalent of about a hundred lines. And (e) was published in a scientific journal.

It’s also delightfully fun to read aloud.

I spent a while trying to figure out what to call the meter. I would say each metrical foot is four beats long, with the third syllable stressed; that kind of foot is apparently called a third paeon or tertius paeon. So maybe this is something like “tertius paeonic tetrameter”? (Or “tertiary,” maybe?) But I suspect that most people would consider each of those four-beat feet to instead be two trochees (each consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one). So this probably counts as trochaic octameter, which is essentially the rhythm of “The Raven.” To my ear, if I divide the lines of the linguistics paper into four-beat feet, the first syllable of each foot has lighter stress than the third syllable; but I think it would nonetheless be reasonable to think of the feet as trochaic instead of paeonic.

But regardless of how to label the meter, I think the paper is a tour de force.

I’m sad to see that the author, Dr. Anne Cutler, died a few days ago, at age 77. Wikipedia says: “Her research, summarised in the book Native Listening, centres on human listeners’ recognition of spoken language, and in particular on how the brain’s processes of decoding speech are shaped by language-specific listening experience.” This paper is very much in that vein.

I’ll leave you with my favorite bit from the paper, from the literature-review section:

More experiments were subsequently carried out in Spanish, and in Catalan and Portuguese and Québécois and Dutch, which in spite of minor variance did nothing that would banish the conclusion that for hearers rhythm matters very much.