There has been unbroken Anglophone settlement of the Falkland Islands, a British Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic, since 1833. The current chapter begins with an overview of the islands’ settlement and socio-economic history, taking into consideration migration from the English South-West and the Scottish Highlands, contact in the nineteenth century with Spanish-speaking gauchos, twentieth century population decline and the aftermath of the brief 1982 conflict with Argentina, since which both the population and the economy of the islands have picked up in sociolinguistically consequential ways. The chapter then provides a detailed overview of the phonology, morphosyntax and lexis of contemporary Falkland Island English, based on a near-million word corpus of spoken conversational data collected by Andrea Sudbury in the late 1990s and Hannah Hedegard in early 2020. This description represents, therefore, an update from earlier accounts (e.g. Britain and Sudbury 2010, 2013; Sudbury 2000, 2001, 2004), given our analysis of a very recently collected new corpus.

A substantial portion of the global human population live with some level of hearing loss, and the World Health Organization estimates this disability may affect up to one in four people by 2050. For people who use speech to communicate, hearing impairment can cause serious disruption to daily life, yet we do not fully understand how speech rhythm perception is impacted by hearing loss. Moreover, in the case of people who use cochlear implants to listen, it is unclear how well aspects of speech rhythm are captured by hearing devices. This chapter surveys an interdisciplinary literature, bringing together insights from perception, speech therapy, and hearing and audiological sciences across the lifespan to construct an emergent picture of speech rhythm processing in the context of hearing disability.

Durational information provides a reliable cue to the unfolding syntactic structure of a sentence. At the same time, durational properties of speech are largely dependent on predictability: Less predictable elements of an utterance are more carefully articulated, and thus produced more slowly. While these two determinants of duration (structure and predictability) often align, there exists a well-defined exception where the two factors make opposite predictions. We discuss converging evidence for tempo modulation playing a crucial role in the disambiguation of clausal attachment (modifier versus argument), leading to a shorter duration for the less predictable nested structure and a longer duration for the more predictable sisterhood structure. We then present an account of these temporal patterns based on the interaction of independently motivated prosodic principles.

A string of speech is a string of syllables, a series of varying amounts of jaw openings/closings. Neutralizing the vowel-intrinsic jaw opening indicates a pattern of jaw opening matching the utterance syllable prominence patterns. The hypothesis is that the jaw-opening patterns ensue from the metrical hierarchy of the language, such that for languages such as English, we see exponentially increasing jaw displacement on the metrically strong syllable within each foot, phrase, and utterance; for languages such as French, Chinese, and Japanese, we see increased jaw displacement at the end of each phrase, with the largest amount of jaw displacement at the end of the utterance. These language-specific jaw-displacement patterns tend to be carried over when learning a second language. Also explored in this chapter are segmental articulation interactions with jaw-displacement patterns, as well as the relationship between metrically motivated jaw displacement patterns and listeners’ perceptions of utterance prominence patterns.

This chapter reviews speech rhythm in the context of prosodic entrainment in speakers with autism, and then presents data on speaking-rate entrainment obtained from conversations of children and adolescents with and without autism. The study focuses in particular on speaking rate entrainment at the level of the conversational turn and compares patterns of speaking rate entrainment to patterns in entrainment of fundamental frequency. The relationship between local entrainment at the conversational turn level is furthermore compared to global conversational entrainment that occurs over the course of the entire conversation. Results show no differences in entrainment in speaking rate at the turn level between speakers with and without autism. Furthermore, speaking rate and fundamental frequency entrainment behavior are correlated at the level of the conversational turn for both groups. Lastly, results suggest that turn-level entrainment is not correlated with global entrainment in fundamental frequency, possibly indicating that local and global entrainment serve different conversational functions.

A considerable amount of the linguistic input that young infants receive consists of multi-word utterances where word boundaries are not marked by pauses. Therefore, a crucial step in language acquisition is to learn to parse the continuous speech stream into possible word candidates. Here we argue that the ability to anticipate how the speech signal will unfold plays an important part in speech segmentation throughout the lifespan, and that spoken language that is rhythmic and temporally predictable will have the biggest effect on the speech segmentation. We introduce spontaneous pupillary synchrony with auditory stimuli as a novel way of investigating speech perception and segmentation as the speech signal unfolds. We discuss two studies with adults and young infants that show what synchronized changes in pupil size can reveal about the perception of temporal and structural rhythmic regularities in spoken language.

In speech, linguistic information is encoded in hierarchically organized units such as phones, syllables, and words. In auditory neuroscience, it is widely accepted that syllables in connected speech are quasi-rhythmic, and the rhythmicity makes them suitable to be encoded by theta-band neural oscillations. The rhythmicity of phones or words, however, is more controversial. Here, we analyze the statistical regularity in the duration of phones, syllables, and words, based on large corpora in English and Mandarin Chinese. The coefficient of variation (CV) of unit duration is slightly lower for syllables than phones and words, consistent with the idea that syllables are more rhythmic than phones and words, but the difference is weak. The mean duration of phones, syllables, and words matches the timescales of alpha-, theta-, and delta-band neural oscillations, respectively.

This chapter provides an account of the types of contact and spread associated with the growth of English beyond the United Kingdom. It describes the main linguistic outcomes of these contacts, including pidgins, creoles, English as a second language (ESL), English as a Foreign Language (EFL), English as Lingua Franca (ELF), Immigrant Englishes and hybridities arising from code-switching and electronic and social media. It also gives an account of how different scholars have tried to make sense of the immense variety within ‘the English language complex’. Particular attention is paid to Kachru’s Three Circles model, Schneider’s Dynamic Model and its current refinements, Mair’s World System for Englishes, Mesthrie’s Contact-Contingency model, and insights from Corpus Linguistics, Language Contact and Language Ecology.

The “speech envelope” is often used as an acoustic proxy for neural rhythm. The problem is its assumption that the unfiltered, broadband signal can satisfactorily model neural modulation in the auditory pathway (and beyond). However, the auditory system does not function as a passive transducer but rather decomposes and segregates the signal into an array of tonotopically organized frequency channels. This modulation filtering results in a partitioning of slow (3–20 Hz) neural modulation patterns across the tonotopic axis that bear only a passing resemblance to the broadband speech envelope. Such polychromatic diversity (in frequency, magnitude, and phase) of auditory modulation patterns is critical for decoding the speech signal, as it highlights critical linguistic properties such as articulatory-acoustic and prosodic features important for decoding and understanding spoken language. The low-frequency modulation patterns associated with high-frequency (>2 kHz) auditory channels are especially important for prosodic processing and consonant discrimination, both key for speech intelligibility, especially in adverse listening conditions and among the hard of hearing.

A novel approach of this book is its reliance on experimental evidence primarily drawn from well-controlled comparisons between completely illiterate and literate individuals, highlighting the mind-enhancing powers of reading. To properly interpret this evidence, it is necessary to clarify the evolving definitions of literacy and often inconsistent terminology used to describe individuals with varying literacy levels.

The colonial period, roughly between 1600 and 1900, saw an unprecedented movement of speakers of English to locations overseas. The reasons for this movement vary considerably, from deportation of prisoners and political opponents to voluntary emigration by groups with economic motives, sometimes mixed with religious ones. The rise of first language overseas varieties depends heavily on the founder generation and the sociolinguistic scenarios they found themselves in. In addition, many countries have second language varieties which in general have arisen through an English-oriented educational system and, previously, through contact in colonies with English speakers.

A better understanding of where speech and language rhythms come from may not only require their investigation in humans but also their roots in the animal kingdom. In this chapter, we summarize what is known about the role of locomotion and respiration as generators of rhythm across species. Furthermore, we discuss selected prosodic phenomena such as f0 declination over the course of an utterance and final lengthening at the end of an utterance as markers of rhythm. We summarize the evidence as to what extent they may also appear in communicative calls of animals, propose a new research program along those lines, and discuss their relation to language representations.

An increasing number of studies report that different forms of rhythmic stimulation influence linguistic task performance. First, this chapter aims at describing to what extent the construction of a tree-like structure in which lower-level units are combined into higher-level constituents in linguistic syntax and rhythm could be subserved by similar mechanisms. Second, we review and categorize rhythmic stimulation findings based on the temporal delay between the rhythmic stimulation and linguistic task that it influences, the precise relationship between the rhythmic and linguistic stimuli used, and the nature of the linguistic task. Lastly, this chapter discusses which categories of rhythmic stimulation effects can be interpreted in a framework based on a shared cognitive system that is responsible for hierarchical structure building.

New media create new realities, and, more than we often realize or acknowledge, new ways of thinking: new minds. Reading and the written medium transform not only societies but also individual minds.

This chapter provides a description of two language varieties spoken in Hawai‘i: Pidgin, an English-based creole, known exonymically as Hawai‘i Creole, and Hawai‘i English, the regional variety of English spoken in Hawai‘i. While Pidgin and Hawai‘i English are treated here as separate entities, we also acknowledge the continuum between them. Our description of linguistic variation in both varieties is based on analysis of speech from informal interviews. We present findings from work that examines variation in linguistic forms, including postvocalic /r/, and we focus especially on variation among vowels. The acoustic analysis of over 8,000 tokens of monophthongs has allowed us to examine and discuss how the vowels of Hawai‘i English and Pidgin have changed over time.

The medium is not merely a channel for transmitting information or a passive carrier of content. While we tend to focus on the content, it is the medium that brings about the deeper, transformative effects. Extending McLuhan’s insight, one compelling conclusion emerges: The mind is the medium. The science of the benefits of the written medium for individual minds elucidates the myriad ways in which reading reshapes and enhances human cognition.

The study of memory resilience and cognitive aging remains in its early stages. Nevertheless, growing evidence suggests that a lifetime of literacy engagement and continued reading in older age confer significant cognitive benefits. High literacy levels are associated with increased cognitive reserve; which may offer a buffer against age-related memory decline. Once forgetfulness begins to interfere with daily functioning, this additional reserve may help avid readers maintain cognitive performance. In people at elevated risk for age-related memory disorders, such reserve may even delay or mitigate the onset of full-blown dementia.