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Assessing Flexible Rhythm Production Abilities
Poster Session B, Wednesday, September 30, 4:30 - 6:30 pm, Wangari Maathai
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Simone Gastaldon1, Tomáš Lenč1, Sonja A. Kotz2,3, Nicola Molinaro1,4; 1BCBL - Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain, 2Department of Neuropsychology and Psychopharmacology, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands, 3Department of Neurology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany, 4Ikerbasque - Basque Foundation for Science, Bilbao, Spain
Rhythm is a pervasive feature of human biology and behavior, from breathing and heartbeats to music, dance, and speech. Although speech is often not perceived as rhythmic as music, research in linguistics and cognitive neuroscience has shown that spoken language exhibits quasi-rhythmic regularities shaped by articulatory, acoustic, and neural constraints. Across languages, syllabic events tend to occur within a relatively narrow range of approximately 3 to 5 Hz, suggesting a preferred temporal regime for human speech. These regularities enable the brain to generate temporal predictions that facilitate speech segmentation, supported by the synchronization of neural oscillations to acoustic and linguistic features. Individual differences in rhythm abilities appear to play an important role in language. In particular, the capacity to synchronize speech production with external auditory rhythms, as measured by the Speech-to-Speech Synchronization task, predicts performance in speech perception. However, existing research has focused primarily on isochronous rhythms, in which events occur at regular intervals. This is a major limitation as natural speech contains variations in onset timing, syllable duration, and pauses, reflecting phonological, prosodic, lexical, biomechanical, and neural influences. Here we outline a comprehensive assessment of what we term flexible rhythm production abilities. The project will relate these abilities to cortical tracking of continuous speech, testing whether flexible rhythm production explains neural speech tracking beyond traditional measures of isochronous synchronization. This relationship will be examined across three main domains: native language processing, second-language acquisition, and speech-language abilities after stroke, using magnetoencephalography. Behaviorally, the battery assesses individual differences in the ability to produce three classes of rhythms: (1) synchronize to (SSS test, implicit version) and reproducing isochronous syllable sequences, (2) anisochronous but structurally regular syllable sequences derived from musical rhythms, and (3) anisochronous speech-derived rhythms based on the amplitude envelopes and syllabic structure of natural utterances recorded in multiple languages. Tasks are administered in both speech production and finger-tapping modalities, allowing to distinguish domain-general rhythmic abilities from effector-specific motor control. Our central hypothesis is that individuals likely differ in their accuracy across isochronous, musical, and speech-derived rhythms, and that these distinct skills may contribute differentially to neural speech tracking. We predict that individuals who perform poorly on isochronous rhythms will also tend to perform poorly on anisochronous rhythms, whereas individuals who perform well on isochronous rhythms may show more variable performance on anisochronous rhythms. Regarding anisochronous speech and musical rhythms, we consider two alternative possibilities: speech-derived rhythms may prove more difficult to reproduce, suggesting a degree of speech-specificity, or no meaningful differences may emerge between speech and music, suggesting that anisochronicity itself, rather than the nature of a stimulus, is the critical factor. By moving beyond isochrony, the project aims to establish a novel framework for studying how rhythmic abilities shape human speech processing capabilities.
Topic Areas: Speech Motor Control, Speech Perception