Rhythmic subvocalization: An eye-tracking study on silent poetry reading

The present study investigates effects of conventionally metered and rhymed poetry on eyemovements in silent reading. Readers saw MRRL poems (i.e., metrically regular, rhymed language) in two layouts. In poem layout, verse endings coincided with line breaks. In prose layout verse endings could be mid-line. We also added metrical and rhyme anomalies. We hypothesized that silently reading MRRL results in building up auditive expectations that are based on a rhythmic “audible gestalt” and propose that rhythmicity is generated through subvocalization. Our results revealed that readers were sensitive to rhythmic-gestalt-anomalies but showed differential effects in poem and prose layouts. Metrical anomalies in particular resulted in robust reading disruptions across a variety of eye-movement measures in the poem layout and caused re-reading of the local context. Rhyme anomalies elicited stronger effects in prose layout and resulted in systematic re-reading of pre-rhymes. The presence or absence of rhythmic-gestalt-anomalies, as well as the layout manipulation, also affected reading in general. Effects of syllable number indicated a high degree of subvocalization. The overall pattern of results suggests that eye-movements reflect, and are closely aligned with, the rhythmic subvocalization of MRRL.

This study introduces a two-stage approach to the analysis of long MRRL stimuli and contributes to the discussion of how the processing of rhythm in music and speech may overlap.

Infants' Implicit Rhyme Perception in Child Songs and Its Relationship With Vocabulary

Rhyme perception is an important predictor for future literacy. Assessing rhyme abilities, however, commonly requires children to make explicit rhyme judgements on single words. Here we explored whether infants already implicitly process rhymes in natural rhyming contexts (child songs) and whether this response correlates with later vocabulary size. In a passive listening ERP study, 10.5 month-old Dutch infants were exposed to rhyming and non-rhyming child songs. Two types of rhyme effects were analysed: (1) ERPs elicited by the first rhyme occurring in each song (rhyme sensitivity) and (2) ERPs elicited by rhymes repeating after the first rhyme in each song (rhyme repetition). Only for the latter a tentative negativity for rhymes from 0 to 200 ms after the onset of the rhyme word was found. This rhyme repetition effect correlated with productive vocabulary at 18 months-old, but not with any other vocabulary measure (perception at 10.5 or 18 months-old). While awaiting future replication, the study indicates precursors of phonological awareness already during infancy and with ecologically valid linguistic stimuli.

Effects of ASL Rhyme and Rhythm on Deaf Children's Engagement Behavior and Accuracy in Recitation: Evidence from a Single Case Design

Early language acquisition is critical for lifelong success in language, literacy, and academic studies. There is much to explore about the specific techniques used to foster deaf children’s language development. The use of rhyme and rhythm in American Sign Language (ASL) remains understudied. This single-subject study compared the effects of rhyming and non-rhyming ASL stories on the engagement behavior and accuracy in recitation of five deaf children between three and six years old in an ASL/English bilingual early childhood classroom. With the application of alternating treatment design with initial baseline, it is the first experimental research of its kind on ASL rhyme and rhythm. Baseline data revealed the lack of rhyme awareness in children and informed the decision to provide intervention as a condition to examine the effects of explicit handshape rhyme awareness instruction on increasing engagement behavior and accuracy in recitation. There were four phases in this study: baseline, handshape rhyme awareness intervention, alternating treatments, and preference. Visual analysis and total mean and mean difference procedures were employed to analyze results. The findings indicate that recitation skills in young deaf children can be supported through interventions utilizing ASL rhyme and rhythm supplemented with ASL phonological awareness activities. A potential case of sign language impairment was identified in a native signer, creating a new line of inquiry in using ASL rhyme, rhythm, and phonological awareness to detect atypical language patterns.

Metric Structure and Rhyme Predictability Modulate Speech Intensity During Child-Directed and Read-Alone Productions of Children's Literature

Temporal and phonological predictability in children's literature may support early literacy acquisition. Realization of predictive structure in caregiver prosody could guide children's attention during shared reading, thereby supporting reading subskill development. However, little is known about how predictive structure is realized prosodically during child-directed reading. We investigated whether speakers use word intensity to signal predictive metric and rhyme structure in child-directed and read-alone productions of The Cat in the Hat (Dr. Seuss, 1957), by modeling maximum intensity (dB) of monosyllabic words as a function of metric strength, rhyme predictability, and a set of control parameters. In the control model, intensity increased with lower lexical frequency, capitalization, first mention, and likelihood of a syntactic boundary. Metric structure predicted word intensity beyond these control factors in a hierarchical manner: words aligned with beat one in a 6/8 metric structure were produced with highest intensity, words aligned with beat four were produced with intermediate intensity, and words aligned with all other beats were produced with the lowest intensity. Additionally, phonologically predictable rhyme targets were reduced in intensity. The effects of meter and rhyme were not moderated by the presence of a child audience. These results demonstrate that predictability along multiple dimensions is encoded during reading of poetic children's literature, and that metric structure is realized hierarchically in word intensity. Further, the manner by which predictability is encoded in word intensity differs from that previously reported for word duration in this corpus (Breen, 2018), demonstrating that intensity and duration present nonidentical prosodic information channels.

The Twelve Cranial Nerves of Christmas: Mnemonics, Rhyme, and Anatomy - Seeing the Lighter Side

Anatomy, has in history, been linked to helpful ways to remember structures, branches of nerves, structures passing through foramina, etc. Scalp is even a mnemonic in itself (Skin, Connective tissue, Aponeurosis, Loose areolar tissue, Pericranium). There has been concern by some educators that using mnemonics or rhymes promotes a surface approach to learning and is unhelpful in establishing long-term and meaningful deep learning. This article argues that mnemonics and rhyme can be used, in the appropriate way, at the right time, by students as an important learning strategy. That strategy can help lay a foundation of knowledge to be developed and later built upon, or simply recall information more easily. Mnemonics, like all information that is to be recalled, is consolidated by rehearsal. In examining the neuroanatomy of learning theories, it is therefore possible to suggest that when students begin to learn an area of anatomy, such as the cranial nerves, using a mnemonic or rhyme, it can help students remember the names and facilitate the engagement of the working memory processes assisting the student to build a construct for subsequent deeper layers of knowledge. Modern approaches to anatomy education involve a myriad of learning opportunities, but educators must assess the value of each one before recommending them to students. It appears that using mnemonics and rhyme is as valid today as it has been for centuries.

A Picture Is Worth… Both Spelling and Sound

In an event-related potential (ERP) study using picture stimuli, we explored whether spelling information is co-activated with sound information even when neither type of information is explicitly provided. Pairs of picture stimuli presented in a rhyming paradigm were varied by both phonology (the two images in a pair had either rhyming, e.g., boat and goat, or non-rhyming, e.g., boat and cane, labels) and orthography (rhyming image pairs had labels that were either spelled the same, e.g., boat and goat, or not spelled the same, e.g., brain and cane). Electrophysiological picture rhyming (sound) effects were evident in terms of both N400/N450 and late effect amplitude: Non-rhyming images elicited more negative waves than rhyming images. Remarkably, the magnitude of the late ERP rhyming effect was modulated by spelling - even though words were neither explicitly seen nor heard during the task. Moreover, both the N400/N450 and late rhyming effects in the spelled-the-same (orthographically matched) condition were larger in the group with higher scores (by median split) on a standardized measure of sound awareness. Overall, the findings show concomitant meaning (semantic), sound (phonological), and spelling (orthographic) activation for picture processing in a rhyming paradigm, especially in young adults with better reading skills. Not outwardly lexical but nonetheless modulated by reading skill, electrophysiological picture rhyming effects may be useful for exploring co-activation in children with dyslexia.

Clues cue the smooze: rhyme, pausing, and prediction help children learn new words from storybooks

Rhyme, which is ubiquitous in the language experiences of young children, may be especially facilitative to vocabulary learning because of how it can support active predictions about upcoming words. In two experiments, we tested whether rhyme, when used to help children anticipate new words would make those words easier to learn. Two- to 4-year-old children heard rhyming stanzas naming novel monsters under three conditions: A non-rhyme condition in which novel monster names appeared as unrhymed elements within a rhymed stanza, a non-predictive rhyme condition in which the novel names were the rhymed element in the first line of a stanza, and a predictive rhyme condition in which the monster name came as the rhymed element in the last line of the stanza after a description of the features that distinguished him. In tests of retention and identification children showed greatest novel name learning in the predictive rhyme condition in both between-subjects (Experiment 1) and within-subjects (Experiment 2) comparisons. Additionally, when parents acted as the storybook readers in Experiment 2, many of them distinctly paused before target words in the predictive rhyme condition and for their children a stronger predictive rhyme advantage surfaced. Thus rhyme is not only facilitative for learning, but when the novel vocabulary is specifically in a position where it is predictable from the rhymes, it is most accessible.

A preliminary investigation of segmentation and rhyme abilities of children who stutter

The present study investigated segmentation and rhyme abilities, skills critical for phonological encoding, of children who stutter (CWS) and those who do not (CNS). Participants were 9 CWS (8 males and 1 female, mean age=11.1, SD=2.31) in the age range of 7 and 13 years and 9 age and sex matched CNS (mean age=11.2, SD=2.19). Participants performed two verbal monitoring tasks, phoneme and rhyme monitoring, in silent naming. Performances in the verbal monitoring tasks were compared to a neutral, nonverbal tone monitoring task. Additionally, the complexity of the phoneme monitoring task was varied such that participants had to monitor for singletons vs. consonant clusters. Repeated measures analysis of the response time data did not reveal significant differences between the groups in the three monitoring tasks. Analysis of the complexity data revealed a trend for slower monitoring of the consonant clusters in the CWS group compared to the CNS. Present findings do not support a deficit in segmentation and rhyme abilities in CWS, although there was some preliminary evidence of segmentation difficulties with increasing phonological complexity of the stimuli.

EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES

At the end of this activity the reader will be able to: (a) discuss the literature on phonological encoding skills in children who stutter, (b) describe skills underlying the phonological encoding process, (c) summarize whether or not children who stutter differ from those who do not in segmentation and rhyme abilities, (d) suggest future areas of research in the investigation of segmentation and rhyme monitoring abilities in children who stutter.

Aesthetic and emotional effects of meter and rhyme in poetry

Metrical patterning and rhyme are frequently employed in poetry but also in infant-directed speech, play, rites, and festive events. Drawing on four line-stanzas from nineteenth and twentieth German poetry that feature end rhyme and regular meter, the present study tested the hypothesis that meter and rhyme have an impact on aesthetic liking, emotional involvement, and affective valence attributions. Hypotheses that postulate such effects have been advocated ever since ancient rhetoric and poetics, yet they have barely been empirically tested. More recently, in the field of cognitive poetics, these traditional assumptions have been readopted into a general cognitive framework. In the present experiment, we tested the influence of meter and rhyme as well as their interaction with lexicality in the aesthetic and emotional perception of poetry. Participants listened to stanzas that were systematically modified with regard to meter and rhyme and rated them. Both rhyme and regular meter led to enhanced aesthetic appreciation, higher intensity in processing, and more positively perceived and felt emotions, with the latter finding being mediated by lexicality. Together these findings clearly show that both features significantly contribute to the aesthetic and emotional perception of poetry and thus confirm assumptions about their impact put forward by cognitive poetics. The present results are explained within the theoretical framework of cognitive fluency, which links structural features of poetry with aesthetic and emotional appraisal.