The failure to document isochronous interstress intervals in spoken English may be attributed to the unconstrained nature of most experimental tasks. Some experiments are described which probe the degree to which the relative durations of interstress intervals within a series of repeated phrases are independent. The experiments introduce a novel paradigm, `speech cycling', for investigating temporal phenomena in speech. The data reveal the presence of strong rhythmic constraints on stress timing which have hitherto eluded experimenters. It is argued that these constraints are evidence for a task-specific dynamical system in which prominent events (stress beats) are constrained to occur at specific, predictable, phases of an enclosing cycle. The dynamical system is characterized by entrainment between metrical levels, a principle which underlies rhythmic coordination in activities such as locomotion. 1 Introduction Numerous phoneticians have suggested that English speech tends to exh...

Studies of coordination in rhythmic limb movement have established that certain phase relationships among cycling limbs are preferred, i.e. patterns such as synchrony and anti-synchrony are produced more often and more reliably than arbitrary relations. A speech experiment in which subjects attempt to place a phrase-medial stress at a range of phases within an overall phrase repetition cycle is presented, and analogous results are found. Certain phase relations occur more frequently and exhibit greater stability than others. To a first approximation, these phases are predicted by a simple harmonic model. The observed commonalities between limb movements and spoken rhythm support Lashley's conjecture that a common control strategy underlies the coordination of all rhythmic activity. Introduction In his famous paper on the problem of serial order, Lashley (1951) emphasized the importance of rhythmic coordination in all integrated movement, suggesting that speech and other forms of coord...

Animals and humans exhibit many kinds of behavior where the frequencies of gestures are related by small integer ratios (like 1:1, 2:1 or 3:1). We show that speakers who repeat a short phrase to a metronome have a strong tendency to place the onsets of stressed syllables at temporal harmonic fractions of the metronome cycle (like 1/2, 1/3 and 2/3). Studies of errors by early language learners also show that some metrical patterns are easier than others. All these effects support a view of meter as an abstract dynamical system on the state space of two or more oscillators. 1 Introduction It is a common observation that human speech is often rhythmically produced. One thinks of worksongs, nursery rhymes, auctioneer calls, group recitation of prayers and chants, marching songs, cheers at sport events, chants by train conductors and so forth. It is worth our time to wonder where such rhythmic performance comes from. It appears that typical speech rhythms vary from language to language, es...

The issue of representing speech rhythm is understood in this paper as the search for relevant primary parameters that will allow the formalisation of speech rhythm. Current speech synthesisers show that phonological models are not satisfactory with respect to the modelling of speech rhythmicity. Our analysis indicates that this may be in part related to the formalisation of rhythmic representation. Based on the observation of other communicative systems facing the problem of representing rhythm, parameters are described for representing speech rhythmic structures. INTRODUCTION Speech rhythm usually designates a complex physical and perceptual parameter. It involves the coordination of various levels of speech production (e.g. breathing, phonatory and articulatory gestures, kinaesthetic control) as well as a multilevel cognitive treatment based on the synchronised activation of various cortical areas (e.g. motor area, perception areas, language areas). Defining speech rhythm thus rem...