The distinctive morphology of the Neandertal midface has long intrigued researchers. A comprehensive understanding of their upper airways, encompassing the nasal cavity and paranasal sinuses, is essential for unraveling Neandertal paleobiology. These airways are integral to vital functions such as respiration, olfaction, and speech. Analyzing their structural interconnections across various craniofacial units sheds light on Neandertal skeletal anatomy and evolutionary dynamics. This review delves into recent studies exploring respiratory air conditioning, olfaction, and metabolic functions associated with the nasal and paranasal cavities. Additionally, it examines hypotheses and research pertaining to phonation and speech involving the pharynx and larynx. Lastly, the review scrutinizes the overall airway structure, its morphological aspects, growth patterns, and relationships within the Neandertal craniofacial system, considering the organism’s energetic demands.

Ignatius Sancho had a rich artistic life, from music to literary criticism to engagement with the theater. Unfortunately, little is known about the latter – Joseph Jekyll’s 1782 short biography of Sancho offers only a few sentences about what appears to have been a failed attempt at playing the titular leads of William Shakespeare’s Othello and Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko. However, Jekyll’s biography offers an important window into eighteenth-century thinking about race and performance, in spite of (and, in part, because of) its limited and compromised nature. Crucial to Jekyll’s explanation for Sancho’s theatrical failure is a supposedly “defective and incorrigible articulation,” most often read along the lines of disability. This chapter examines how vocal and linguistic performance in the eighteenth-century created and disrupted popular narratives about race.

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.

Music, like language, relies on listeners’ ability to extract information as it unfolds in time. One key difference between music and language is the strong rhythmic regularities of music relative to language. Despite a wealth of literature describing the rhythms of song as regular and the rhythms of speech as irregular, the acoustic features and neural processing of rhythmic regularity in song and (lack thereof) in speech are poorly understood. This chapter examines acoustic, behavioral, and neural indices of rhythmic regularity in speech and song. Our goal is to review which features induce rhythmic regularity and examine how regularity impacts attention, memory, and comprehension. This work has the potential to inform a wide range of areas, including clinical interventions for speech and reading, best practices for teaching and learning in the classroom, and how attention is captured in real-world scenarios.

Music rhythm and speech rhythm share acoustic, temporal and syntactic similarities, and neuroscience research has shown that similar areas and networks in the brain are recruited to process both types of signals. Rhythm is a core predictive element for both music and speech, allowing for facilitated processing of upcoming, predicted elements. The combined study of music and speech rhythm processing can be particularly insightful, considering the stronger regularity and predictability of musical rhythm. Although speech rhythm is less regular, it still contains regularities, notably at syllabic and prosodic levels. In this chapter, we outline different research lines investigating connections between music and speech rhythm processing, including the recently proposed processing rhythm in speech and music framework, as well as music rhythm interventions and stimulations that aim to improve speech signal processing both in the short term and the long term. Implications for developmental language disorders and future research perspectives are outlined.

The term “prosody” encompasses properties of speech that span several timescales and levels of linguistic units, from the intensity and pitch of phonemes and syllables to the overall timing and intonation of utterances and conversations. Hierarchical temporal structure was introduced as a measure of clustering in sound energy that quantifies the relationship among timescales of prosody and related aspects of speech and music. The present chapter reviews several studies showing that the degree of hierarchical temporal structure in speech signals, as measured by the rate of increase in clustering with timescale, reflects the degree of prosodic composition. Prosodic composition can serve different purposes in communication, including linguistic emphasis and chunking in infant-directed speech, scaffolding of spoken interactions with children whose speech abilities are relatively less developed, and stricter timing in formal interactions. Prosodic composition as expressed by hierarchical temporal structure may serve as a control parameter in speech production and communication.

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.

Modern proponents of free speech maintain that the value of expression resides in its authenticity-making power, which generates political legitimacy. They simultaneously concede that the value of expression is not without abridgments, no matter how deeply felt or authentically fulfilling such expression may be. Given these commitments, how can free speech be valued for its authenticity-making power, and yet also conditionally regulated? This chapter explores a resolution based on an interpretation of Aquinas’s thought on speech and expression. First, Aquinas clarifies Aristotle’s distinction between vox (animal expression) and loquutio (logical discourse) as an irreducible relationship of explanandum and explanans: loquutio is uniquely disposed to comprehending what is just or unjust within what is pleasant or painful. Second, Thomistic loquutio is directed to truth while permitting false claims as logical-temporal constituents of discourse, requiring above all a “discursive situation” that avoids both contradiction and epistemically unjustified conviction. These characteristics of Thomistic loquutio are supported by his treatment of angelic communication, which is not revelatory so much as consultatory from a second-person perspective and clarificatory from a first-person perspective. Ultimately, this interpretive Thomistic account rejects the modern commitment of authenticity without absolutism, while affirming certain aspects of what makes speech politically valuable.

This Chapter emphasizes the centrality of voice and ear in the oral cultures and theatrical enterprises of early modern England. It further demonstrates that the sound of the voice and the act of listening are especially important in the works of William Shakespeare. To prepare the reader for an in-depth exploration of the significance of voice and vocality in five of Shakespeare’s late plays, the Chapter reviews important work in the fields of sound studies and ethical criticism. It then provides an introduction to the philosophical thought of Emmanuel Levinas and Adriana Cavarero, whose work provides the theoretical basis for the analysis that follows.

Chapter 5 explores some relations between rhetorical models for speeches in praise of the gods and Platonist texts relating to metaphysics, or ‘theology’, the science of divine first principles. As rhetoric distinguishes different modes and styles in discourse about the gods, so do the Platonists, both in their own works and in those of their ancient authorities (Pythagoras and Plato), distinguish in corresponding ways between different modes of teaching in theology. And as rhetoric prescribes, for speeches about the gods, genealogies of the gods, their actions and benefactions, so too do Platonist theological texts expound the metaphysical genealogy of first principles, a hierarchy of causes and their effects. But speech expresses the limitations of human souls: to approach what is divine and transcendent, which is ineffable, is to be silent, to practice the silence of Pythagoras and of Socrates.

This Chapter considers the significance of voice in Coriolanus, especially the way voices are located within bodies. It shows how the patricians situate their voices in the “worthier” parts of the body and the citizens’ voices in the “worser,” leveraging anti-corporeal and anti-materialist ideologies to authorize their own speech and discredit the citizens’. Nevertheless, the voices in this play are highly mobile. They repeatedly move about within bodies and between bodies, undercutting the patricians’ conservative approach and allowing us to envision radical alternatives. Invoking work by Emmanuel Levinas and Adriana Cavarero, the Chapter concludes by fleshing out these radical alternatives.

Traditionally, scholars have focused on how narratives of the lives of the enslaved, commonly understood as “slave narratives,” engaged with explicit claims to authenticity and authority as distinct from those of the novel genre that developed coterminously. Indeed, scholars of the slave narrative have frequently focused almost exclusively on the discursive foundations and frameworks of abolitionism. To solely focus on whether or not a narrative is “true or authentic” is to accept that narratives of the lives of the enslaved can only ever be political ethnography, as opposed to aesthetics. However, like others, enslaved and free Black narrators drew heavily upon engagements with notions of subjectivity and social action that appeared in other genres such as poetry and the novel. And so, consequently, rather than understanding the slave narrative as a genre that is focused solely on the institution of enslavement, we have instead a complex genre that is in dynamic conversation with other institutions, concepts, discourses, and genres. In addition to acknowledging how subaltern groups appropriated other forms of discourse, this chapter will examine how these inherently hybrid and complex texts participated directly and dynamically within discussions of identity, nation, and empire, as well as slavery.