Rhyming Effect Research Articles

Auditory pseudoword rhyming effects in bilingual children reflect second language proficiency: An ERP study

This study investigated second language (L2-English) phonological processing in 31 Spanish-English bilingual, 6- to 8-year-old schoolchildren in an event-related potential (ERP) auditory pseudoword rhyming paradigm. In addition, associations between ERP effects and L2 proficiency as measured by standardized tests of receptive language and receptive vocabulary were explored. We found a classic posterior ERP rhyming effect that was more widely distributed in children with higher L2 proficiency in group analyses and was larger for children with better L2 proficiency in correlation analyses. In contrast, the amplitude of an early (75–125 ms) auditory positivity was larger in children with lower L2 proficiency. This pattern suggests differential use of early and late auditory/phonological processing resources in the pseudoword rhyme task associated with L2 proficiency, which is consistent with the predictions of the lexical restructuring model in a bilingual context.

Infants' Implicit Rhyme Perception in Child Songs and Its Relationship With Vocabulary.

Rhyme perception is an important predictor for future literacy. Assessing rhyme abilities, however, commonly requires children to make explicit rhyme judgements on single words. Here we explored whether infants already implicitly process rhymes in natural rhyming contexts (child songs) and whether this response correlates with later vocabulary size. In a passive listening ERP study, 10.5 month-old Dutch infants were exposed to rhyming and non-rhyming child songs. Two types of rhyme effects were analysed: (1) ERPs elicited by the first rhyme occurring in each song (rhyme sensitivity) and (2) ERPs elicited by rhymes repeating after the first rhyme in each song (rhyme repetition). Only for the latter a tentative negativity for rhymes from 0 to 200 ms after the onset of the rhyme word was found. This rhyme repetition effect correlated with productive vocabulary at 18 months-old, but not with any other vocabulary measure (perception at 10.5 or 18 months-old). While awaiting future replication, the study indicates precursors of phonological awareness already during infancy and with ecologically valid linguistic stimuli.

Enriching Deaf Children's American Sign Language Phonological Awareness: A Quasi-Experimental Study.

With the knowledge that deaf children benefit from early exposure to signed language, questions are raised about the role of specific types of language input that are beneficial in early childhood classrooms. This quasi-experimental study explores the effects of ASL rhyme, rhythm, and handshape awareness activities on 4- to 6-year-old deaf children's ASL phonological awareness. Deaf children received three-week structured activities and four-week teacher-choice activities that targeted handshape awareness. Results yielded evidence that interventions as brief as 12minutes daily for up to 2 months can produce positive effects on deaf children's phonological awareness. Furthermore, although the intervention focused only on handshape awareness, children's positive gains on the ASL Phonological Awareness Test suggests one targeted phonological awareness skill (e.g., handshape) may generalize to other phonological awareness skills (e.g., location and movement). Further investigation is needed on the relationship between ASL phonological awareness and overall language and literacy skills in both ASL and English.

Forms in Motion: The Poetic Prose of Robert Macfarlane and Kathleen Jamie

Abstract This essay examines the use of poetic prose in recent non-fiction by Robert Macfarlane and Kathleen Jamie. Drawing on selected chapters from Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (2012), Jamie’s Sightlines (2012), and a prose poem from Jamie’s The Bonniest Companie (2015), it demonstrates the hybridity of contemporary nature writing by paying attention to the works’ transgressions of the bounds of verse and prose. After introducing the nineteenth-century debate on differences between lyric and prosaic language and outlining Romantic efforts to poeticize prose descriptions of nature and environment, the article discusses Macfarlane’s and Jamie’s role in this conversation. I argue that formal transgressions – evident in metrical and rhyming effects, typographical experiments, imagery, and allusion – are especially strong in passages that describe movement: in accounts of walking or in observations of the shifting motions of light and weather. Prose forms that approximate and integrate lyricism here enhance a sense of transience as well as exhibit the continuity of human and non-human worlds. Self-consciously tracing the footsteps of other poets who have traversed genre boundaries, Macfarlane’s and Jamie’s work establishes nature writing as a form that is persistently on the move.

Second language experience influences salience of phonological units in spoken word production in the first language

Research question: Previous research suggests that the grain size of primary phonological units (PUs) in spoken word production is language-specific (e.g., phonemic segments in Germanic languages, and atonal syllables in Chinese). When the two languages of bilingual speakers have different primary PUs in their native speakers, will first language (L1) phonological processing be influenced by second language (L2) experience? Methodology: In a picture–word interference task, native Chinese speakers who spoke English as L2 were required to say aloud the predesignated L1 name of a picture while ignoring a written L1 character superimposed on the picture. The picture name shared a certain phonological component (i.e., rhyme or atonal syllable) with the distractor in the related condition but not in the unrelated condition. Data and analysis: Data of 186 participants from eight originally independent experiments were pooled. Multiple regression analyses were conducted on subject means to investigate whether the effects of rhyme relatedness and syllable relatedness on L1 naming latency were influenced by L2 self-rated proficiency, age of acquisition (AoA), and/or years of use. Trial-by-trial data were then analyzed with linear mixed-effects modeling. Findings: Both the rhyme effect and the syllable effect increased with years of L2 use, indicating that the salience of PUs in L1 spoken word production can be influenced by L2 experience. Originality: The current study adopted a chronometric approach to investigate the influence of L2 experience on phonological processing during L1 spoken word production. Importantly, multiple aspects of L2 experience (i.e., self-rated proficiency, AoA, and years of use) were examined at the same time in a relatively large sample. Implications: The current findings provide evidence for backward transfer of primary PUs in spoken word production, which demonstrates the plasticity of the phonological encoding process in bilingual speakers. These findings are discussed and compared with cross-language transfer of phonological awareness in the discussion.

What the eyes reveal about (reading) poetry

This study investigated how rhyme and meter affect eye movements and subjective aesthetic evaluations while reading poems. Earlier findings suggest that the effects might include prosodic predictability-driven cognitive and affective rewards from increased processing fluency (Blohm, Wagner, Schlesewsky and Menninghaus, 2018, McGlone and Tofighbakhsh, 2000), but also semantic and syntactic disfluency, as rhyme and meter are often implemented at the expense of unusual word forms and word order (Menninghaus et al., 2015, Wallot and Menninghaus, 2018). This study set out to investigate the extent to which eye movements might reveal not only distinct effects of fluency and disfluency at the same time, but potentially also hedonic responses that are associated with longer rather than shorter self-motivated exposure, in line with the hypothesis of “savoring” (Frijda and Sundararajan, 2007). The results reveal several fluency-enhancing effects of rhyme and meter on reading times for more global features of the poems, but also increased disfluency effects on gaze durations for some more local features of the poems. Moreover, some of the latter effects are readily interpretable in terms of the savoring hypothesis. Eye movement characteristics that were predictive of higher aesthetic evaluation—irrespective of the presence or absence of rhyme and meter—similarly resulted in increased fluency, disfluency, and savoring effects. Our study thus reveals, for the first time, a complex picture of effects that co-occur while reading poetic prosody, based on analyzing different dimensions of a single psychophysiological variable, namely, eye movements.

Uncoupled Brain and Behavior Changes in Lexical, Phonological, and Memory Processing in Struggling Readers

ABSTRACT Paired behavioral and ERP measures were used to track change over time in 17 third- and fourth-grade struggling readers. Word and nonword reading on standardized tests improved, but differentiation of words and letter strings, measured by N170 and N400 amplitude, did not significantly change. Sound awareness scores improved, but the ERP rhyming effect did not significantly change. Both digit span scores and latency of the P300 oddball effect decreased. Correlations between the ostensibly matched behavioral and electrophysiological measures of change were not significant, indicating that use of ERP and behavioral measures can provide nonoverlapping insight into change during reading development.

Neural Processes Underlying Nonword Rhyme Differentiate Eventual Stuttering Persistence and Recovery.

Purpose Phonological skills have been associated with developmental stuttering. The current study aimed to determine whether the neural processes underlying phonology, specifically for nonword rhyming, differentiated stuttering persistence and recovery. Method Twenty-six children who stutter (CWS) and 18 children who do not stutter, aged 5 years, completed an auditory nonword rhyming task. Event-related brain potentials were elicited by prime, rhyming, and nonrhyming targets. CWS were followed longitudinally to determine eventual persistence (n = 14) or recovery (n = 12). This is a retrospective analysis of data acquired when all CWS presented as stuttering. Results CWS who eventually recovered and children who do not stutter exhibited the expected rhyme effect, with larger event-related brain potential amplitudes elicited by nonrhyme targets compared to rhyme targets. In contrast, CWS who eventually persisted exhibited a reverse rhyme effect, with larger responses to rhyme than nonrhyme targets. Conclusions These findings suggest that CWS who eventually persisted are not receiving the same benefit of phonological priming as CWS who eventually recovered for complex nonword rhyming tasks. These results indicate divergent patterns of phonological processing in young CWS who eventually persisted, especially for difficult tasks with limited semantic context, and suggest that the age of 5 years may be an important developmental period for phonology in CWS. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.12682874.

Neural Indices Mediating Rhyme Discrimination Differ for Some Young Children Who Stutter Regardless of Eventual Recovery or Persistence.

Purpose Previous studies of neural processing of rhyme discrimination in 7- to 8-year-old children who stutter (CWS) distinguished children who had recovered, children who had persisted, and children who did not stutter (CWNS; Mohan & Weber, 2015). Here, we investigate neural processing mediating rhyme discrimination for early acquired real words in younger CWS and CWNS (4;1-6;0 years;months), when rhyming abilities are newly emerging, to examine possible relationships to eventual recovery (CWS-eRec) and persistence in stuttering (CWS-ePer). Method Children performed a rhyme discrimination task while their event-related brain potentials were recorded. CWNS, CWS-eRec, and CWS-ePer had similar speech and language abilities. Inclusionary criteria incorporated at least 70% accuracy for rhyme discrimination. Analyses focused on the mean amplitude of the N400 component elicited by rhyming and nonrhyming words in anterior and posterior regions of interest. Results CWNS, CWS-eRec, and CWS-ePer displayed a classic event-related potential rhyme effect for rhyme discrimination characterized by larger amplitude, posteriorly distributed N400s elicited by nonrhyming targets compared to rhyming targets. CWNS displayed a more robust anterior rhyme effect compared to the CWS groups with a larger amplitude N400 anteriorly for the rhyming targets. This effect was more consistent across individual CWNS than CWS. Conclusions The groups of CWNS, CWS-eRec, and CWS-ePer, who had all developed rhyming discrimination abilities, exhibited similar underlying neural processes mediating phonological processing of early acquired words for the classic central-parietal rhyme effect. However, individual variability of the anterior rhyme effect suggested differences in specific aspects of phonological processing for some CWS-eRec and CWS-ePer compared to CWNS.

- The poet Moazy El Nisaboury was influenced by Arab poets - comparative study

Comparative studies are an important field of literary studies in the Arabic language, and their importance is shown in the fact that this area shows the greatness of Arabic language and literature and its impact on everyone who deals with it. This influence was reflected in its strongest form in the nations that entered Islam in the first Islamic conquests, One of the most affected nations is the Persian nation, the Arabic language in the poets and literature of the Persians in the early Hijri centuries influenced so strongly that some poets organized in the two tongues, and enriched their poems with quotations from the Arabic literature. They were influenced by the former and contemporary Arab poets according to culture The era that was based on the glorious poet is the poet familiar with the poetry of the Arab poets and the best representative of this vulnerability poet Moazy El Nisaboury which was marked by the appearance of his hair the effect of Arab poets in his poetry clearly. I have addressed this impact with the icons of Arabic poetry from Emraa El Qays and Abu Nawas and Al-Mutanabi in the presentation of the effects of images, meanings, rhyme, weight and others, within the limits of the comparative approach belonging to the French school supported by the descriptive analytical approach to Analysis of poetic texts, Then at the end of the research introduce the findings and recommendations

Metric Structure and Rhyme Predictability Modulate Speech Intensity During Child-Directed and Read-Alone Productions of Children's Literature.

Temporal and phonological predictability in children's literature may support early literacy acquisition. Realization of predictive structure in caregiver prosody could guide children's attention during shared reading, thereby supporting reading subskill development. However, little is known about how predictive structure is realized prosodically during child-directed reading. We investigated whether speakers use word intensity to signal predictive metric and rhyme structure in child-directed and read-alone productions of The Cat in the Hat (Dr. Seuss, 1957), by modeling maximum intensity (dB) of monosyllabic words as a function of metric strength, rhyme predictability, and a set of control parameters. In the control model, intensity increased with lower lexical frequency, capitalization, first mention, and likelihood of a syntactic boundary. Metric structure predicted word intensity beyond these control factors in a hierarchical manner: words aligned with beat one in a 6/8 metric structure were produced with highest intensity, words aligned with beat four were produced with intermediate intensity, and words aligned with all other beats were produced with the lowest intensity. Additionally, phonologically predictable rhyme targets were reduced in intensity. The effects of meter and rhyme were not moderated by the presence of a child audience. These results demonstrate that predictability along multiple dimensions is encoded during reading of poetic children's literature, and that metric structure is realized hierarchically in word intensity. Further, the manner by which predictability is encoded in word intensity differs from that previously reported for word duration in this corpus (Breen, 2018), demonstrating that intensity and duration present nonidentical prosodic information channels.

Auditory rhyme processing in expert freestyle rap lyricists and novices: An ERP study

Music and language processing share and sometimes compete for brain resources. An extreme case of such shared processing occurs in improvised rap music, in which performers, or ‘lyricists’, combine rhyming, rhythmic, and semantic structures of language with musical rhythm, harmony, and phrasing to create integrally meaningful musical expressions. We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate how auditory rhyme sequence processing differed between expert lyricists and non-lyricists. Participants listened to rhythmically presented pseudo-word triplets each of which terminated in a full-rhyme (e.g., STEEK, PREEK; FLEEK), half-rhyme (e.g., STEEK, PREEK; FREET), or non-rhyme (e.g., STEEK, PREEK; YAME), then judged each sequence in its aesthetic (Do you ‘like’ the rhyme?) or technical (Is the rhyme ‘perfect’?) aspect. Phonological N450 showed rhyming effects between conditions (i.e., non vs. full; half vs. full; non vs. half) similarly across groups in parietal electrodes. However, concurrent activity in frontocentral electrodes showed left-laterality in non-lyricists, but not lyricists. Furthermore, non-lyricists’ responses to the three conditions were distinct in morphology and amplitude at left-hemisphere electrodes with no condition difference at right-hemisphere electrodes, while lyricists' responses to half-rhymes they deemed unsatisfactory were similar to full-rhyme at left-hemisphere electrodes, and similar to non-rhyme at right-hemisphere electrodes. The CNV response observed while waiting for the second and third pseudo-word in the sequence was more enhanced to aesthetic rhyme judgments tasks than to technical rhyme judgment tasks in non-lyricists, suggesting their investment of greater effort for aesthetic rhyme judgments. No task effects were observed in lyricists, suggesting that aesthetic and technical rhyme judgments may engage the same processes for experts. Overall, our findings suggest that extensive practice of improvised lyricism may uniquely encourage the neuroplasticity of integrated linguistic and musical feature processing in the brain.

An ERP study of cross-modal rhyming: Influences of phonology and orthography.

In a cross-modal rhyming study with visual pseudoword primes and auditory word targets, we found a typical ERP rhyming effect such that nonrhyming targets elicited a larger N400/N450 than rhyming targets. An orthographic effect was also apparent in the same 350- to 600-ms epoch as the phonological effect: The rhyming effect for targets with rime orthography that did not match their primes' (e.g., tain-"sane") was smaller over the left hemisphere than the rhyming effect for targets with rime orthography that did match their primes' (e.g., nain-"gain"), although the spellings of the auditory word targets were never explicitly shown. Our results indicate that this cross-modal ERP rhyming effect indexes both phonological and orthographic processing-for auditory stimuli for which no orthography is presented in the task. This pattern of findings is consistent with the notion of coactivation of sublexical orthography and phonology in fluent adult readers as they both read and listen.

Ambiguity effects of rhyme and meter.

Previous research has shown that rhyme and meter-although enhancing prosodic processing ease and memorability-also tend to make semantic processing more demanding. Using a set of rhymed and metered proverbs, as well as nonrhymed and nonmetered versions of these proverbs, the present study reveals this hitherto unspecified difficulty of comprehension to be specifically driven by perceived ambiguity. Roman Jakobson was the 1st to propose this hypothesis, in 1960. He suggested that "ambiguity is an intrinsic, inalienable feature" of "parallelistic" diction of which the combination of rhyme and meter is a pronounced example. Our results show that ambiguity indeed explains a substantial portion of the rhyme- and meter-driven difficulty of comprehension. Longer word-reading times differentially reflected ratings for ambiguity and comprehension difficulty. However, the ambiguity effect is not "inalienable." Rather, many rhymed and metered sentences turned out to be low in ambiguity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Cohort and Rhyme Priming Emerge from the Multiplex Network Structure of the Mental Lexicon

Complex networks recently opened new ways for investigating how language use is influenced by the mental representation of word similarities. This work adopts the framework of multiplex lexical networks for investigating lexical retrieval from memory. The focus is on priming, i.e., exposure to a given stimulus facilitating or inhibiting retrieval of a given lexical item. Supported by recent findings of network distance influencing lexical retrieval, the multiplex network approach tests how the layout of hundreds of thousands of word-word similarities in the mental lexicon can lead to priming effects on multiple combined semantic and phonological levels. Results provide quantitative evidence that phonological priming effects are encoded directly in the multiplex structure of the mental representation of words sharing phonemes either in their onsets (cohort priming) or at their ends (rhyme priming). By comparison with randomised null models, both cohort and rhyming effects are found to be emerging properties of the mental lexicon arising from its multiplexity. These priming effects are absent on individual layers but become prominent on the combined multiplex structure. The emergence of priming effects is displayed both when only semantic layers are considered, an approximated representation of the so-called semantic memory, and when semantics is enriched with phonological similarities, an approximated representation of the lexical-auditory nature of the mental lexicon. Multiplex lexical networks can account for connections between semantic and phonological information in the mental lexicon and hence represent a promising modelling route for shedding light on the interplay between multiple aspects of language and human cognition in synergy with experimental psycholinguistic data.

A Picture Is Worth… Both Spelling and Sound.

In an event-related potential (ERP) study using picture stimuli, we explored whether spelling information is co-activated with sound information even when neither type of information is explicitly provided. Pairs of picture stimuli presented in a rhyming paradigm were varied by both phonology (the two images in a pair had either rhyming, e.g., boat and goat, or non-rhyming, e.g., boat and cane, labels) and orthography (rhyming image pairs had labels that were either spelled the same, e.g., boat and goat, or not spelled the same, e.g., brain and cane). Electrophysiological picture rhyming (sound) effects were evident in terms of both N400/N450 and late effect amplitude: Non-rhyming images elicited more negative waves than rhyming images. Remarkably, the magnitude of the late ERP rhyming effect was modulated by spelling – even though words were neither explicitly seen nor heard during the task. Moreover, both the N400/N450 and late rhyming effects in the spelled-the-same (orthographically matched) condition were larger in the group with higher scores (by median split) on a standardized measure of sound awareness. Overall, the findings show concomitant meaning (semantic), sound (phonological), and spelling (orthographic) activation for picture processing in a rhyming paradigm, especially in young adults with better reading skills. Not outwardly lexical but nonetheless modulated by reading skill, electrophysiological picture rhyming effects may be useful for exploring co-activation in children with dyslexia.

Anterior and posterior erp rhyming effects in 3- to 5-year-old children

During early literacy skills development, rhyming is an important indicator of the phonological precursors required for reading. To determine if neural signatures of rhyming are apparent in early childhood, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) from 3- to 5-year-old, preliterate children (N = 62) in an auditory prime-target nonword rhyming paradigm (e.g., bly-gry, blane-vox). Overall, nonrhyming targets elicited a larger negativity (N450) than rhyming targets over posterior regions. In contrast, rhyming targets elicited a larger negativity than nonrhyming targets over fronto-lateral sites. The amplitude of the two rhyming effects was correlated, such that a larger posterior effect occurred with a smaller anterior effect. To determine whether these neural signatures of rhyming related to phonological awareness, we divided the children into two groups based on phonological awareness scores while controlling for age and socioeconomic status. The posterior rhyming effect was stronger and more widely distributed in the group with better phonological awareness, whereas differences between groups for the anterior effect were small and not significant. This pattern of results suggests that the rhyme processes indexed by the anterior effect are developmental precursors to those indexed by the posterior effect. Overall, these findings demonstrate early establishment of distributed neurocognitive networks for rhyme processing.

Supplemental Material for Ambiguity Effects of Rhyme and Meter

Supplemental Material for Ambiguity Effects of Rhyme and Meter

ERPs reveal weaker effects of spelling on auditory rhyme decisions in children than in adults.

A classic finding in psycholinguistics is that orthographic form influences the processing of auditory words. The aim of the present study was to examine how reading experience changes this effect. Specifically, we tested the prediction that top-down visual modulation of spoken word recognition is reduced in children compared to adults, owing to their reduced experience with print. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were measured as 8-10-year-old children and adults made rhyme decisions about spoken word pairs that were either orthographically similar or dissimilar. When orthography did not conflict (e.g., throat-boat), both age groups demonstrated a robust rhyme effect marked by greater N400 to no-rhyme versus rhyme trials. For rhyming trials that differed in orthography (e.g., vote-boat) and non-rhyming trials that shared orthography (e.g., warm-farm), adults showed more interference than children. Differences in orthographic interference suggest an extended developmental schedule for top-down mechanisms in speech recognition.

Aesthetic appreciation of poetry correlates with ease of processing in event-related potentials.

Rhetorical theory suggests that rhythmic and metrical features of language substantially contribute to persuading, moving, and pleasing an audience. A potential explanation of these effects is offered by "cognitive fluency theory," which stipulates that recurring patterns (e.g., meter) enhance perceptual fluency and can lead to greater aesthetic appreciation. In this article, we explore these two assertions by investigating the effects of meter and rhyme in the reception of poetry by means of event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Participants listened to four versions of lyrical stanzas that varied in terms of meter and rhyme, and rated the stanzas for rhythmicity and aesthetic liking. The behavioral and ERP results were in accord with enhanced liking and rhythmicity ratings for metered and rhyming stanzas. The metered and rhyming stanzas elicited smaller N400/P600 ERP responses than their nonmetered, nonrhyming, or nonmetered and nonrhyming counterparts. In addition, the N400 and P600 effects for the lyrical stanzas correlated with aesthetic liking effects (metered-nonmetered), implying that modulation of the N400 and P600 has a direct bearing on the aesthetic appreciation of lyrical stanzas. We suggest that these effects are indicative of perceptual-fluency-enhanced aesthetic liking, as postulated by cognitive fluency theory.