Abstract
While rhythmic expectancies are thought to be at the base of beat perception in music, the extent to which stress patterns in speech are similarly represented and predicted during on-line language comprehension is debated. The temporal prediction of stress may be advantageous to speech processing, as stress patterns aid segmentation and mark new information in utterances. However, while linguistic stress patterns may be organized into hierarchical metrical structures similarly to musical meter, they do not typically present the same degree of periodicity. We review the theoretical background for the idea that stress patterns are predicted and address the following questions: First, what is the evidence that listeners can predict the temporal location of stress based on preceding rhythm? If they can, is it thanks to neural entrainment mechanisms similar to those utilized for musical beat perception? And lastly, what linguistic factors other than rhythm may account for the prediction of stress in natural speech? We conclude that while expectancies based on the periodic presentation of stresses are at play in some of the current literature, other processes are likely to affect the prediction of stress in more naturalistic, less isochronous speech. Specifically, aspects of prosody other than amplitude changes (e.g., intonation) as well as lexical, syntactic and information structural constraints on the realization of stress may all contribute to the probabilistic expectation of stress in speech.
Highlights
In the domain of music, it is well established that metric structure gives rise to expectancies which allow humans to perceive and synchronize to a beat (Large and Kolen, 1994; Large and Jones, 1999)
We have focused on studies that induced temporal expectations for specific stress patterns based on the idea that stress in speech is rhythmically organized
While these studies have often appealed to theories of hierarchical metrical grids, they have typically induced prediction of stress by artificially increasing the amount of periodicity found in speech
Summary
In the domain of music, it is well established that metric structure gives rise to expectancies which allow humans to perceive and synchronize to a beat (Large and Kolen, 1994; Large and Jones, 1999). The authors expected RTs to be shorter when the target phoneme occurred on a syllable that had been predicted to be stressed based on the preceding rhythmic context. While both Shields et al (1974) and Pitt and Samuel (1990) based their hypotheses on theories of metrical grids, the meter of the sentences was not itself controlled for; factors other than stress rhythm may have confounded the effects of timing expectancies (e.g., semantic and syntactic prediction for whether a verb or a noun would occur in Pitt and Samuel, 1990).
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