The question “Have I already been here, or is it the first time I see this place?” offers a paradigmatic example of the topological spatial uncertainty that may arise when exploring a new environment. This type of uncertainty concerns both the number of places encountered, and the order in which they are visited. Its occurrence requires taking into account different hypotheses about the size an...

Informationally Given phrases following an instance of focus are generally realized in a compressed pitch range and are assumed to lack prosodic prominences above the word level. In this paper, we address the question of the metrical representation of postfocal constituents in Tuscan Italian. The results of a production experiment show that, despite their being realized with a low and flat F0 c...

In many languages, loss of an underlying vowel results in stress patterns which are atypical for the language as a whole. For example, in Bedouin Hijazi Arabic (Al-Mozainy 1981, Al-Mozainy et al. 1985, McCarthy 1999), syncope of /a/ in an open antepenult creates words with stress on a light (CV) penult rather than the antepenult, the typical pattern for words with a light penult: underlying //i...

Musical rhythm perception is a natural human ability that involves complex cognitive processes. Rhythm refers to the organization of events in time, and musical rhythms have an underlying hierarchical metrical structure. The metrical structure induces the feeling of a beat and the extent to which a rhythm induces the feeling of a beat is referred to as its metrical strength. Binary ratios are t...

Certain types of speech, e.g. lists of words or numbers, are usually spoken with a clear speech rhythm. Salient, stressed vowels are aligned to rhythmic points within the phrase period. The main hypothesis of this study (derived from the Dynamic Attending Theory; M.R. Jones (1976), Psych. Rev. 83, 323–355) is that listeners attend in particular to speech events at these rhythmic time points. Be...

In this paper we build on earlier observations and theory regarding word length frequency and sequential distribution to develop a mathematical characterization of some of the language features distinguishing isometrically lineated text from unlineated text, in other words the features distinguishing isometrical verse from prose. It is shown that the frequency of Qn of n syllables making comple...

A tendency to limit prosodic words (PW) to the size of a metrical foot has often been acknowledged in early stages of acquisition and truncation has been shown to accomplish this size constraint. Interestingly, after the onefoot stage, children acquiring English or Dutch tend to enlarge their productions by one foot, whereas at least for children acquiring Spanish, a stage, in which PWs compris...

Simulated Annealing, a wide-spread technique for combinatorial optimisation, is employed to find the optimal candidate in a candidate set, as defined in Optimality Theory (OT). Being a heuristic techniques, simulated annealing does not guarantee to return the correct solution, and yet, some result is always returned within a constant time. Similarly to language production, this time framework c...

Rhythm perception and synchronization have been extensively investigated in the auditory domain, as they underlie means of human communication such as music and speech. Although recent studies suggest comparable mechanisms for synchronizing with periodically moving visual objects, the extent to which it applies to ecologically relevant information, such as the rhythm of complex biological motio...