Accent phrases and brain waves
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2017/08/0002/000304Keywords:
Intonation, brain oscillations, delta, thetaAbstract
Recent experiments show that theta and delta brain oscillations whose periods vary from 100 ms to 250 ms and from 250 ms to 1300 ms are respectively synchronized in phase with syllables and stressed syllables. This means that, in natural speech, syllables cannot be separated by less than 100 ms and more than 250 ms to be perceived as unstressed. Over this limit, they are perceived as stressed but their separation cannot exceed 1300 ms. Considering the brain predictive function as observed in silent reading or self-talk, where restored syllables and stressed syllables activate theta and delta oscillations, a general language acquisition and speech recognition model is suggested.
References
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Ghitza O., Greenberg S. 2009. On the possible role of brain rhythms in speech perception: intelligibility of time-compressed speech with periodic and aperiodic insertions of silence, Phonetica. 2009, 66(1-2), 113-26.
Martin, Ph. 2014. Spontaneous speech corpus data validates prosodic constraints, Proceedings of the 6th conference on speech prosody. Campbell, Gibbon, and Hirst (eds.), 525-529.
Martin, Ph. 2015. The Structure of Spoken Language. Cambridge University Press.
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Copyright (c) 2017 Philippe Martin (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
