Limit cycle dynamics in prosody
Fred A. Cummins · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1998
Compared to music, juggling, dancing, etc., speech may seem to be only weakly rhythmic. New experimental evidence suggests, however, that rhythmic constraints on the timing of certain speech events can be quite strong. This is particularly clear when subjects repeat a phrase in time with a periodic stimulus. Mode locking, mode switching, and hysteresis have all been documented, thus showing hallmarks of the hierarchical entrainment among two periodic cycles. These cycles are coextensive with independently motivated prosodic units, the foot (or prosodic word), and the intonational phrase. It appears that this repetition task induces a second-order limit cycle dynamic in each of these units. [Work supported by the Indiana University Graduate School and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.]