Stuttering is a developmental speech disorder characterized by interruptions of fluency. A large body of research suggests that stuttering occurs due to a reduced ability to generate timing signals in order to sequence speech sounds. One piece of supporting evidence for this is that when speaking along with an external timing source like a…

Purpose: Humans have a near-automatic tendency to entrain their motor actions to rhythms in the environment. Entrainment has been hypothesized to play an important role in processing naturalistic stimuli, such as speech and music, which have intrinsically rhythmic properties. Here, we studied two facets of entraining one's rhythmic motor actions…

Speakers employ acoustic cues (pitch accents) to indicate that a word is important, but may also use visual cues (beat gestures, head nods, eyebrow movements) for this purpose. Even though these acoustic and visual cues are related, the exact nature of this relationship is far from well understood. We investigate whether producing a visual beat…

Research is reported in which subjects were required to perceive sentences in noise. A series of sentences having the same syntax and rhythm was presented. On a final sentence either rhythm alone or rhythm plus syntax were changed. The results stress the importance of rhythm in speech perception. (Author/RM)

Special issue devoted to the second conference on structuro-global-audio-visual methodology, at Mons, Belgium, 1971; extracts from the writings of P. Guberina. (VM)