During the course of a metrical and non-metrical study of the clavicle of the Australian aboriginal one pair of bones out of the 292 clavicles examined showed features of the conoid tuberosity well beyond the normal range of variation. These features were reflected also in the corresponding coracoid processes of the scapulae and indicated that, in life, these bones had been in articulation. The...

This paper is dedicated to the study of metrical properties of a collection of 2D thinning algorithms that we have proposed. Here, we characterize their underlying metrics and use it to reduce the classical metrical biases that affect thinning algorithms in the square grid. We show that some algorithms from the collection lead to skeletons based on a particular geometry, corresponding to the (4...

One kind of prosodic structure that apparently underlies both music and some examples of speech production is meter. Yet detailed measurements of the timing of both music and speech show that the nested periodicities that deene metrical structure can be quite noisy in time. What kind of system could produce or perceive such variable metrical timing patterns? And what would it take to be able to...

This paper describes a programmatic theory of a process in early visual processing called indexing. The theory hypothesizes that a small number of primitive indexes are available for individuating, tracking and providing direct access to salient visual objects. We discuss some empirical and theoretical arguments in favor of the proposed index as a resource-limited link between an internal visua...

This paper explores how data generated by meter induction models may be recycled to quantify metrical ambiguity, which is calculated by measuring the dispersion of metrical induction strengths across a population of possible meters. A measure of dispersion commonly used in economics to measure income inequality, the Gini coefficient, is introduced for this purpose. The value of this metric as a...

This paper proposes a new approach to the prosodysyntax interface inHPSG. Previous approaches to prosody in HPSG (Klein, 2000; Haji-Abdolhosseini, 2003) represent prosodic information by constructing metrical constituent structure in the tradition of (Selkirk, 1980; Liberman and Prince, 1977). One drawback of this approach is that it does not allow for a direct representation of purely metrical...

When we move to music we feel the beat, and this feeling can shape the sound we hear. Previous studies have shown that when people listen to a metrically ambiguous rhythm pattern, moving the body on a certain beat--adults, by actively bouncing themselves in synchrony with the experimenter, and babies, by being bounced passively in the experimenter's arms--can bias their auditory metrical repres...

Listeners are sensitive to the metric structure of words, i.e., an alternating pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, in auditory speech processing: Event-related potentials recorded as participants listen to a sequence of words with a consistent metrical pattern, e.g., a series of trochaic words, suggest that participants register words metrically incongruent with the preceding sequence...