{"id":18458,"date":"2022-06-11T13:25:18","date_gmt":"2022-06-11T20:25:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=18458"},"modified":"2022-06-11T13:30:05","modified_gmt":"2022-06-11T20:30:05","slug":"best-linguistics-paper-ever-the-perception-of-rhythm-in-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2022\/06\/11\/best-linguistics-paper-ever-the-perception-of-rhythm-in-language\/","title":{"rendered":"Best linguistics paper ever: \u201cThe perception of rhythm in language\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

Yesterday, a friend pointed me to a brilliant three-page linguistics paper, published in 1994: \u201cThe perception of rhythm in language<\/a>,\u201d by psycholinguist Dr. Anne Cutler.<\/p>\r\n

Here\u2019s the beginning of part 1 of the text:<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

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\u2014a running stream of sound.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

In case it\u2019s not clear to you why that\u2019s brilliant, here\u2019s a reformatted version of those sentences:<\/p>\r\n

\r\n
\r\n

The orthography of English has a very simple basis<\/p>\r\n

for establishing where words in written texts begin and end:<\/p>\r\n

both before and also after every word are empty spaces<\/p>\r\n

and this demarcation surely helps the reader comprehend.<\/p>\r\n

In a spoken text, however, as presented to a hearer,<\/p>\r\n

such explicit segmentation cues are rarely to be found;<\/p>\r\n

little pauses after every single word might make things clearer,<\/p>\r\n

but the input is continuous\u2014a running stream of sound.<\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

And yes, the entire three-page paper<\/em> (except for the section headings) is written in that meter and rhyme scheme.<\/p>\r\n

In short, it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\r\n

It\u2019s also delightfully fun to read aloud.<\/p>\r\n

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<\/i> or tertius paeon<\/a><\/i>. So maybe this is something like \u201ctertius paeonic tetrameter\u201d? (Or \u201ctertiary,\u201d 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<\/a>, which is essentially the rhythm of \u201cThe Raven.\u201d 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.<\/p>\r\n

But regardless of how to label the meter, I think the paper is a tour de force.<\/p>\r\n

I\u2019m sad to see that the author, Dr. Anne Cutler<\/a>, died a few days ago, at age 77. Wikipedia says: \u201cHer research, summarised in the book Native Listening<\/i>, centres on human listeners\u2019 recognition of spoken language, and in particular on how the brain\u2019s processes of decoding speech are shaped by language-specific listening experience.\u201d This paper is very much in that vein.<\/p>\r\n

I\u2019ll leave you with my favorite bit from the paper, from the literature-review section:<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

More experiments were subsequently carried out in Spanish, and in Catalan and Portuguese and Qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois and Dutch, which in spite of minor variance did nothing that would banish the conclusion that for hearers rhythm matters very much.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[77,78,102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rhyme","category-rhythm-stress-meter","category-verse"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18458"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18468,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18458\/revisions\/18468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}