Evolution of speech rhythm: a cross-species perspective
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Animal Behavior, Developmental Biology, Evolutionary Studies, Neuroscience, Psychiatry and Psychology
- Keywords
- time perception, Speech rhythm, timing, bioacoustics, hierarchical, rhythm cognition, vocal learning, auditory cognitive neuroscience
- Copyright
- © 2019 Ravignani et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2019. Evolution of speech rhythm: a cross-species perspective. PeerJ Preprints 7:e27539v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27539v1
Abstract
Cognition and communication, at the core of human speech rhythm, do not leave a fossil record. However, if the purpose is to understand the origin and evolution of speech rhythm, alternative methods are available. A powerful tool is comparative approach: studying the presence or absence of cognitive/behavioral traits in other species, drawing conclusions on which traits are shared between species, and which are recent human inventions. Here we apply this approach to traits related to human speech rhythm. Many species exhibit temporal structure in their vocalizations but little is known about the range of rhythmic structures perceived and produced, their biological and developmental bases, and communicative functions. We review the literatures on human and non-human studies of rhythm in speech and animal vocalizations to survey similarities and differences. We report important links between vocal perception and motor coordination, and the differentiation of rhythm based on hierarchical temporal structure. We extend this review to quantitative techniques useful for computing rhythmic structure in acoustic sequences and hence facilitating cross-species research. While still far from a full comparative cross-species perspective of speech rhythm, we are closer to fitting missing pieces of the puzzle.
Author Comment
This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints. The manuscript will be submitted to a special issue of the journal Annals of the NYAS.