Ahren Fitzroy & Mara Breen, Mount Holyoke College
Poster presented at The Neurosciences and Music - VI: Music, Sound, and Health, Boston, MA (2017)
(for reprint, contact ahren.fitzroy@gmail.com)
Audio examples:
Synthesized Cat In the Hat excerpt, normal order
Synthesized Cat In the Hat excerpt, random order
References:
Astheimer, L. B., & Sanders, L. D. (2009). Listeners modulate temporally selective attention during natural speech processing. Biological Psychology, 80(1), 23–34. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2008.01.015
Breen, M. (2017). Word durations in The Cat in the Hat are affected by metrical hierarchy and rhyme predictability. Talk presented at the 30th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Boston, MA. http://tedlab.mit.edu/cuny_abstracts/378_Final_Manuscript.pdf
Drake, C., & Palmer, C. (1993). Accent Structures in Music Performance. Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 10(3), 343–378. https://doi.org/10.2307/40285574
Dr. Seuss. (1957). The Cat in the Hat. New York, NY: Random House.
Fitzroy, A. B., & Sanders, L. D. (2015). Musical Meter Modulates the Allocation of Attention across Time. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 27(12), 2339–2351. https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_00862
Jusczyk, P. W., Houston, D. M., & Newsome, M. (1999). The Beginnings of Word Segmentation in English-Learning Infants. Cognitive Psychology, 39(3–4), 159–207. https://doi.org/10.1006/cogp.1999.0716
Leong, V., & Goswami, U. (2015). Acoustic-Emergent Phonology in the Amplitude Envelope of Child-Directed Speech. PLOS ONE, 10(12), e0144411. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0144411
Lieberman, P. (1963). Some Effects of Semantic and Grammatical Context on the Production and Perception of Speech. Language and Speech, 6(3), 172–187. https://doi.org/10.1177/002383096300600306
Todd, N. (1985). A Model of Expressive Timing in Tonal Music. Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 3(1), 33–57. https://doi.org/10.2307/40285321
Abstract:
Our overarching hypothesis is that metric structure in speech is useful for guiding children’s segmentation during early language learning. We investigated then whether talkers and listeners confer similar metric structure to child-directed poetic speech. We modeled intensity variation in a corpus of productions of The Cat in the Hat (Dr. Seuss, 1957) using a metric accent model derived from music performance (Drake & Palmer, 1993). Using linear mixed-effects regression, we modeled the maximum intensity (dB) of each word as a function of metric strength. Consistent with the model, metric structure predicted word intensity: words aligned with beat one in a 6/8 metric structure were produced with the greatest intensity, and words aligned with beat four were produced with intensity less than beat one but greater than all others. Consistent with prior work showing intensity reduction for predictable speech, words aligned with beat four were reduced when they completed a couplet. Preliminary event-related potential (ERP) data indicate that listeners confer a similar 6/8 metric structure on synthesized productions of The Cat in the Hat absent suprasegmental prosodic information. Together these findings suggest talkers impart metric structure to child-directed poetic speech in a manner that meets the neuroperceptual expectations of the listener.