This chapter introduces Bayes’ theorem and uses it to ask critical questions about the diagnosticity of evidence – its ability to distinguish between competing hypotheses. It applies this framework to two controversies: whether vaccines cause autism and whether Biden legitimately won the 2020 US election. In both cases, one side relied exclusively on nondiagnostic evidence, facts that have alternative explanations. A key focus is the likelihood ratio, a term in Bayes’ theorem that can represent how much trust we should place in various sources of evidence (e.g., scientific experts, election officials) and in processes like peer or judicial review. The chapter critically examines the peer review system through the case of Andrew Wakefield’s retracted study linking vaccines to autism. Peer review failed to detect misreporting of data and a conflict of interests – highlighting the need to supplement peer review with scientific replication. Together, these examples underscore the importance of public understanding of epistemic institutions and the use of deliberative argumentation to explore alternative hypotheses.

A long-standing debate among scholars continues concerning the validity of rhythmic classification of the world’s languages. In order to address the remaining questions, it is key to further explore the speech production by bilinguals with 2L1s and second-language speakers. According to the majority of previous studies, results from bilinguals are intermediate between those of the two kinds of monolinguals, and results from second-language speakers are influenced by the rhythms of their first languages, which appear to support the rhythmic classification. However, several questions remain. The first is how to classify languages that exhibit characteristics of multiple rhythmic types. The second is that previous studies generally demonstrate that languages are more or less stress-timed, syllable-timed, or mora-timed, rather than strictly belonging to a single rhythm category. The third is that the proposed rhythmic measures are not comprehensive, and new measures are needed to account for the morphological and syntactic components of languages.

One of the remarkable characteristics of spoken language is that it is constantly undergoing change. The plasticity of sound patterns, that is, their susceptibility to short- and long-term changes, is driven by processes of mutual adaptation during conversational interactions and thereby reflects a constant interplay of perceptual and motor processes of spoken language. Existing models of speech motor control largely neglect the environment-driven phonetic plasticity by focusing on single-person accounts of spoken language production. This chapter addresses the roles of cortical and subcortical structures in the accommodation of speakers and listeners in interactive language use. It reviews investigations of the propensity of patients with different neurologic conditions to align with or adapt to others’ speech, with a particular focus on the role of speech rhythm.

Almost no seminar, book, or YouTube tutorial on successful public speaking is without the established and traditional “cork exercise.” It is supposed to enhance speakers’ rhythm and intelligibility, for which there is, however, no scientific evidence so far. Our experiment addresses this gap. Twenty speakers performed a presentation task three times: (1) before a cork exercise intervention, (2) immediately after it, and (3) some minutes later after having completed a distractor questionnaire. The intervention was a video recorded by a professional media trainer. Results show significant rhythmic (and related melodic and articulatory) differences between presentations (1) and (2), suggesting a positive effect for speakers in (2). However, in presentation (3), all measurements revert to the baseline presentation (1) level. Thus, the "cork exercise" basically works and yields positive effects; however, they are short-lived. The chapter ends with suggestions for further research and practical ideas for a more sustainable design of the cork exercise.

A major focus in this chapter will be to learn various ways in which datasets can be transformed using external knowledge. Shallow infusion concerns semantic data transformation and provides the following benefits:

We need to consider that influences of reading on cognition are not restricted only to knowledge effects obtained from the content of what is read. Reading enhances cognitive skills that are highly relevant and useful for doing well in intelligence tests. There is robust evidence that reading massively trains and consequently improves many different perceptual and cognitive abilities: The science of how reading enhances the human mind reveals the many perks of being a bookworm.

Brain rhythms at different timescales are observed ubiquitously across cortex. Despite this ubiquitousness, individual brain areas can be characterized by "spectral profiles," which reflect distinct patterns of endogenous brain rhythms. Crucially, endogenous brain rhythms have often been explicitly or implicitly related to perceptual and cognitive functions. Regarding language, a vast amount of research investigates the role of brain rhythms for speech processing. Particularly, lower-level processes, such as speech segmentation and consecutive syllable encoding and the hemispheric lateralization of such processes, have been related to auditory cortex brain rhythms in the theta and gamma range and explained by neural oscillatory models. Other brain rhythms – particularly delta and beta – have been related to prosodic processing (delta) but also higher-level language processing, including phrasal and sentential processing. Delta and beta brain rhythms have also been related to predictions from the motor cortex, emphasizing the tight link between production and perception. More recently, neural oscillatory models were extended to include different levels of language processing.

Mastering rhythm is essential in learning a second language (L2). This study explores whether shared rhythmic classes in a first language (L1), between English and German as opposed to French, facilitate L2 speech rhythm learning. We analyzed rhythmic patterns in a corpus of accented utterances utilizing a novel rhythm metric based on amplitude envelope modulation frequency. The analysis showed that German-accented English and English-accented German are more likely to be classified as native compared to their French-accented equivalents. Furthermore, German-accented English was classified as English significantly more frequently than German-accented French as French. Importantly, word-based pronunciation proficiency was found to be higher for German and English speakers in their respective L2s, with German speakers exhibiting greater proficiency in English than in French. These findings indicate that shared L1 rhythm significantly aids L2 speech learning and that rhythm planning may be influenced by the words and their segmental compositions.

We conducted two experiments, testing the iambic–trochaic law (ITL) with speakers of English, Greek, and Korean. They heard sequences of tones varying in duration, intensity, or both; stimuli differed in the magnitude of the acoustic differences between alternating tones and involved both short and long inter-stimulus intervals. While the results were not always compatible with ITL predictions and did not show strong grouping preferences, language-related differences did emerge, with Korean participants showing a preference for trochees, and Greek participants being more sensitive to duration differences than the other two groups. Importantly, grouping preferences showed substantial individual variation, evinced by responses to both test sequences and controls (sequences of identical tones). These findings indicate that results from ITL experiments are influenced by linguistic background but are also difficult to replicate, as individual preferences and specific experimental conditions influence how participants impose rhythm structure to sound sequences.