L700: Rhythm and Speech (Seminar on Current Issues)
Section: 3115
Fall, 2001, Monday, 4-6:30.
(Crosslisted as a Cognitive Science elective.)
Robert Port

An overview of aspects of speech timing with a focus on rhythmic
properties of the production of speech in various languages.  Some
issues include: (1) evidence that languages are frequently spoken with
periodic structure - eg, in repeated or chanted text, for emphasis in
spontaneous speech, in song and poetry performance, during cooperative
work (including marching), list reading, etc. (2) why are these
ubiquitious and `universal' behaviors treated as linguistically
irrelevant in formal-symbolic models of language? (3) what are the
perceptual and functional implications of rhythmically produced
speech? (4) technical issues like what kind of events mark the
beginning of a repetition cycle in various languages?  and so on.
Students will take a midterm exam and do a project, which might be a
detailed proposal for an experiment, a modelling project, or a review
paper.