End Of Phrase Research Articles

Body Dances to Speech

* THE SPEAKER who fervently stabs the air with his finger to emphasize a word is giving only a gross demonstration of what apparently goes on all the time between body and speech, a Pittsburgh scientist has found. The body does not simply move randomly as a person speaks, nor is it still. Body movements have a pattern that corresponds precisely to the speech pattern, said Dr. William S. Condon of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh. For instance, as a phrase of speech begins, a part of the body starts to move. As the phrase ends, so does the motion and another begins. Similarly, as an individual's stress in words changes, body movements follow suit. A kick in speech is accompanied by a kick somewhere in the body. In other words, the body, in a sense, dances to the rhythm of speech. Usually these motions are on an extremely subtle and complex level, Dr. Condon told SCIENCE SERVICE. The movement might be in only one part of the body, such as the head, but more often it is a matrix of movement-finger, eyebrow, wrist, foot, and so on. This dancing phenomenon is most prominent at the syllable level, said Dr. Condon. As words break, so do body movements shift direction. For instance, in the phrase, I was gon-na, a subject closed his eyes on gon and opened them on na. Evidently, said the scientist, syllable breaks are extremely important stops in the continuity of language and are therefore clearly reflected in movement. However, shifts sometimes take place on a sub-syllable level. In speech the vowel i breaks into four a's and two e's. Always, body motion, as in the hands, will change direction after the a's. It is difficult to describe verbally, said Dr. Condon. You have to see it to believe it. Throughout close study of 30 or 40 films during the past four years, Dr. Condon has found this precise and consistent correlation between body motion and speech. Moreover, the body-speech unity is universal in normal people. It existed whether the people in the films were Mexicans or Americans, but broke down when the subjects were schizophrenics or brain damaged patients, he said. Speech has a high degree of structure and order, said Dr. Condon. Theoretically, it is possible that when the mind is involved with speaking, it just naturally imposes the same order on the rest of the body. Most recently, Dr. Condon and his colleague, Dr. William Ogston, have found !that brain waves as measured by an electroencephalograph also are synchronized with speech. Phrases repeated by subjects in the study appeared to leave traces on the EEG charts that resembled speech patterns. Even stranger, Dr. Condon said, was the discovery that a listener's body also will dance to the rhythm of speech although he is saying nothing. Perhaps this research is actually tapping what could be called the basic rhythm of life.

Notes on the Pronunciation of 'On'

AS IS generally known, the unrounding of 'short o,' which began in seventeenth-century England, has produced a considerable range of variation in present-day speech. In southern England the rounded [D] though usually considered standard,1 is often replaced by [a]. In America, the range extends from [a] through [a] and [n] to [v], with additional diphthongal variants in the South. In some categories of the 'short-o' words, the range is minimal: hot, stop, and lockJ except for minor local preferences for [a] or [D], are overwhelmingly pronounced with [a]. On the other hand, words like log, gong, honk, torest>2 and warrant show the full range of variation, some of them with distinct regional patterns. The word on differs from other 'short-o? words in two respects: it has a very frequent unstressed form, generally pronounced somewhat like [an]; its stronger forms show regional variations which do not correspond very closely with those of other 'short-o' words. In order to get at the regional variations I have tested the word chiefly at the ends of such phrases as '... turned the radio on' and '.... time to be getting on,' where at least a moderate degree of stress is normal. I have classiEed the [a] and [a] variations as unrounded; [n] and [v], as rounded, though [D] may often, and [v] occasionally, be produced withoult noticeable liprounding. The [a] variation occurs most frequently in the Ontario watershed in New York, occasionally in the Great Lakes area further west, and spottily as far away from the Lakes as Connecticut and Pennsylvania. Of the rounded varieties, [n] is more frequent in New England; [o], in the South. In the following data, [a] and [a] are recorded as U for unrounded; [D] and [v], as R for rounded: Maine: U 13 instances, R 9 instances, U 59%; New Hampshire: U 19, R 3, U 86%; Vermont: U 99, R 5, U 95%; Massachusetts: U 116, R 3y, U 76%; Rhode Island: 21 instances, all U; Connecticut: U 79, R 1, U 98%; New York: U 1766, R 14, U 99%; northern3 New Jersey: U 320, R 31, U 91%o; southern New Jersey: U 26, R 52, R 67%; northern

The Position of "Deferred" Nouns and Adjectives in Epic and Dramatic Verse

-Our appreciation of classical verse is seriously affected by the difficulty of estimating certain factors in ancient verse that are alien to most modern poetry. The editor of Horace's Odes notes the artistic interlocking of words; the student of Propertius discovers a high degree of conscious art in the rhymed endings of words at the ends of metrical phrases; the student of epic observes the emphasis produced by position at the beginning of the hexameter, or the artificial bracketing of a verse by words at the beginning and end which are in sound or sense, or both, closely related. Such observations are often quite true from a descriptive standpoint; but after these features have been described there remains a more difficult problem: Just what degree of conscious art is represented by such features of ancient verse? To what extent are they due to conditions of verse composition beyond the poet's control? To what extent do they reveal a happy compromise between mechanical necessity and the artist's natural desire to enforce the thought and embellish the form ? The final appreciation of the poet's art must carry us beyond mere description, which is seldom altogether free from the influence of the critic's sympathy with modern poetry, and lead us to an understanding of the peculiar problems of the ancient poet, of the necessary adjustment of conflicting factors, many of which are foreign to modern verse. A feature of epic verse that has escaped general recognition but has been incidentally noted by one or two special students of Homer and Vergil is the somewhat monotonous regularity with which words and phrases that escape into the second verse of a sequence of two verses stand at the beginning of the second verse rather than elsewhere. Such words are closely connected in thought with the first verse and might reasonably be expected to stand somewhere near the beginning rather than the end of the second verse in response to the natural requirements of collocation. But there is a stereotyped