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SUMMARY:The origins of speech and anti-rhythms - Laurence White (Plymouth 
 University)
DTSTART:20161020T153000Z
DTEND:20161020T173000Z
UID:TALK68746@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Valentina Colasanti
DESCRIPTION:Although early ideas about the isochronous organisation of spe
 ech units have consistently been shown to lack empirical support\, the pro
 position that speech is rhythmically organised remains prevalent. The conc
 ept of rhythm class is frequently invoked in typological descriptions\, an
 d recent studies of the entrainment of neural oscillators to the amplitude
  envelope of speech often assume a quasi-periodic signal. Typically\, howe
 ver\, speech encodes linguistically important distinctions both through sp
 ectral and temporal variation\, building robust redundancy into the signal
  and giving rise to a strong tendency to "antirhythm" (cf.\, Nolan &amp\; 
 Jeon\, 2014\; Pointon\, 1980\; White\, 2014). Presenting results from stud
 ies of language discrimination and artificial language learning\, I argue 
 that sensitivity to speech rate is evidence of the importance of predictio
 n for listeners\, with deviations from temporal expectation interpreted as
  linguistically meaningful. Expectation arises not only from the signal\, 
 however\, but also from linguistic context and listener-specific factors s
 uch as social experience. Thus\, speakers may modulate temporal regularity
  to trade off their audience's current need for predictability against a t
 endency to maximise the informational efficiency of the signal.
LOCATION:GR06/7 English Faculty
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