Emerson’s poetry has been somewhat of an enigma for readers and critics alike, who have often found it thematically opaque and stylistically unwieldy. Many have concluded that he was incapable of writing “better” verse, a conclusion predicated upon the assumption that he intended to do otherwise but couldn’t. This essay takes as a starting point the idea that the roughness of Emerson’s poetic style was intentional and that his metric irregularities are not accidents. After analyzing the style, rhetoric, and prosody of the poems, this essay contextualizes these elements within Emerson’s metaphysics. It argues that Emerson’s poetry reveals the crumbling of meter that led to the modernist revolution and free verse; poetic style did not suddenly jump from Longfellow to Whitman, but rather meter was stretched and strained before it was broken.

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.

The temporal signatures that characterize speech – especially its prosodic qualities – are observable in the movements of the hands and bodies of its speakers. A neurobiological account of these prosodic rhythms is thus likely to benefit from insights on the neural coding principles underlying co-speech gestures. Here we consider whether the vestibular system, a sensory system that encodes movements of the body, contributes to prosodic processing. Careful review of the vestibular system’s anatomy and physiology, its role in dynamic attention and active inference, its relevance for the perception and production of rhythmic sound sequences, and its involvement in vocalization all point to a potential role for vestibular codes in the neural tracking of speech. Noting that the kinematics and time course of co-speech movements closely mirror prosodic fluctuations in spoken language, we propose that the vestibular system cooperates with other afferent networks to encode and decode prosodic features in multimodal discourse and possibly in the processing of speech presented unimodally.

Intonation units (IUs) are a fundamental prosodic unit of all known human languages, and as such they likely constitute an absolute universal property of language. IUs are chunks defined by a specific pattern of syllable delivery, together with resets in pitch and articulatory force. In this chapter we discuss IUs from four different perspectives and introduce them within the context of rhythms of speech, language, and the brain. First, we provide a detailed description of how IUs are defined. Second, we review linguistic research on the roles of IUs in communication, including their cross-linguistic applicability. This body of research suggests that IUs provide a universal structural cue for the cognitive dynamics of speech production and comprehension at a timescale of ~1 Hz. Third, we synthesize the linguistic perspective with findings from the study of brain rhythms and cognition. Finally, we review the existing algorithmic tools for IU identification from speech acoustics, to facilitate the incorporation of IUs in experimental and quantitative research.

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.

In speech perception, timing and content are interdependent. For example, in distal rate effects, context speech rate determines the number of words, syllables, and phonemes heard in an unchanging target speech segment. Such results confront psycholinguistic theory with the chicken-and-egg problem of concurrently inferring speech timing and content, and the interrelated issues of narrowing the search space of speech interpretations without bias and optimizing the speed/accuracy tradeoff in online processing. We propose listeners address these issues by managing the timing of speech-related computations. Specifically, we claim: (1) Listeners model speech timing as part of a speaker model; (2) variable-length sequences of morphosyntactic units are the basic increments of speech inference; and (3) listeners adaptively schedule inferential updates and computationally intensive operations according to (4) fluctuations in uncertainty predicted by the speaker model. We illustrate these claims in a mechanistic model – vowel-onset-paced syllable inference – explaining multiple psycholinguistic results, including distal rate effects.

On phrasal timescales, spontaneous conversational speech is not very rhythmic. Instead, periods of speech activity are intermittent: Words tend to come in short bursts and are often interrupted with hesitations. Nonetheless, it has been suggested that there is a production mechanism that generates phrasal rhythmicity in speech. This chapter examines the empirical evidence for such a mechanism and concludes that speakers do not directly control the timing of phrases. Instead, it is argued that temporal patterns associated with phrases are epiphenomena of processes involved in conceptual-syntactic organization. A model is presented in which coherency-monitoring systems govern the initiation and interruption of speech activity. Hesitations arise when conceptual or syntactic systems fail to achieve sufficiently ordered states. The model provides a mechanism to account for intermittency on phrasal timescales.

Americans of Mexican or Central American heritage have developed a cluster of dialects that follow recognisable patterns of immigrant groups. These dialects exhibit diversity depending on the region of the United States where they are spoken, the relative concentrations of their speakers, the degree of historical discrimination, the presence of African American influence and other factors. They all share a background of Spanish interference features, but they have all undergone a process of winnowing those features and adopting others as they develop. Phonetic influences have been easier to document than morphosyntactic influences.

Although Elizabeth Bowen is primarily known for her work as a novelist throughout her long career, her prose frequently resembles poetry. She often borrows elements from verse to enhance her fiction. Notably, the three-part greater romantic lyric has an influence on The House in Paris and The Death of the Heart in its plying together of past and present, as well as different locations. In her lectures, radio broadcasts, and literary criticism, Bowen was fond of illustrating the craft of fiction with examples from verse. Not only was she an avid reader and reviewer of contemporary poets such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, and May Sarton, but she was also a close friend of many of them. Whenever her work was compared to poetry, she took it as the highest compliment. This essay explores her intertwined connections, both in her language and in her life, to the poets and poetry that surrounded her.

Critics have routinely voiced their frustrations with William Carlos Williams’s term ‘measure’. But from the late 1930s onwards, he compared his idea of ‘measure’ to the science of measurement. This chapter suggests, first, that to fully appreciate Williams’s measure, one must understand how the science of measurement frequently appeared in the vocabulary of a variety of contemporaneous critics of poetry. In so doing, it sketches a lineage of scientific criticism that began in the late nineteenth century and that shaped modernist theories of prosody. Second, by close reading Williams’s long poem Paterson (1963), it suggests that by rejecting the term ‘rhythm’ and reprising ‘measure’, Williams was attempting to define the knowledge practices proper to poetry in an era where to measure was to know.

This chapter introduces the varied, intense, committed, unruly and, above all else, deeply political attempts to fashion a definitive scientific account of poetic production from 1880 to the present. It shows how, when one casts their eye back on nineteenth- and twentieth-century disciplinary history, criticism was not just written by literary critics. It was also an activity undertaken by scientists – by mathematicians, physicists, psychologists, statisticians, public rationalists, early computer scientists, educationalists and other generalist intellectuals seduced by the power of scientific rationality. This chapter then rehearses the major arguments of the book, noting, first, how professionalised literary criticism was shaped by this search for a science of verse. Second, it outlines how a series of modern poets, from Laura Riding to Veronica Forrest-Thomson, theorised how their poetry could produce a form of knowledge removed from the hegemony of scientific rationality. To do this, the chapter outlines a theory of the epistemology and political power of poetic artifice.

This chapter studies the sixty-plus songs not forming part of Fauré’s seven defined song cycles, with reference also to the recently-published body of wordless vocalises that Fauré produced between 1906 and 1916. His evolving technique in song writing is viewed chronologically, in relation to poets he set, noting how he adapted compositional techniques to different poets; patterns that emerge can imply two further unstated ‘cycles’ involving his settings of Hugo and Baudelaire. Some meticulous hidden musical structuring can be related to his close attention to poetry, along with an unusual but focussed approach to syllabification, with vocal lines characteristically running in rhythmic counterpoint over piano parts rather than comfortably lying within them. Singers with whom Fauré collaborated closely are discussed, noting their vocal and musical qualities and how these may have marked Fauré’s vocal writing; the chapter ends by reciprocally quoting their accounts of Fauré’s wishes and preferences in performance.