Rhythm and the perception of syntax

In short, with @MicahGoldwater, we tested whether the alignment of metrical stress patterns (independent from regularity) could influence how robustly people comprehend syntactically complex sentences. pic.twitter.com/Z4uXvAJd2w

— Courtney Hilton (@courtneybhilton) August 19, 2021

Experiment 2 then replicated this for listening to auditory speech!

(yellow == congruent; orange & red == incongruent) pic.twitter.com/pcMfJ1csbJ

— Courtney Hilton (@courtneybhilton) August 19, 2021

I think these results will be relevant for work making sense of neural oscillations in language processing, especially low-frequency delta oscillations and their relation to syntactic/compositional structure and memory (@davidpoeppel @andrea_e_martin @johannarimmele )

— Courtney Hilton (@courtneybhilton) August 19, 2021

+ for making sense of why when silently reading language, imagining the text in a vivid prosodically rich way aids comprehension (@GolfWriterKiel), and how imagined metrical prosody can affect syntactic parsing (@KentnerGerrit).

— Courtney Hilton (@courtneybhilton) August 19, 2021

Anyway, lots more discussion in the paper if you're interested and I'm more than happy to answer any questions!

— Courtney Hilton (@courtneybhilton) August 19, 2021