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Rhythmic properties of speech and language have been a matter of long-standing debates, with both traditional production and perception studies delivering controversial findings. The present study examines the possibility of investigating linguistic rhythm using movement-based paradigms. Informed by the theory and methods of sensorimotor synchronization, we developed two finger-tapping tasks (synchronization and reproduction), and tested them with English participants. The synchronization task required participants to tap along with the beat of a looped sentence while the reproduction task asked them to tap out the perceived beat patterns after listening to a sentence loop. The results showed that both tasks engaged participants in period tracking of a beat-like structure in the linguistic stimuli, though synchronization did so to a greater extent. Patterns obtained in the reproduction task tended to converge toward participants’ spontaneous tapping rates and showed a degree of regularization. Data collected in the synchronization task displayed a consistent anchoring of taps with the vowel onsets. Overall, synchronization performance with language resembled many well-established findings of sensorimotor synchronization with metronome and music. We conclude that our setting of the sensorimotor synchronization paradigm—finger tapping along with looped spoken phrases—is a valid experimentation tool for studying rhythm perception in language.

The paper deals with research on speech rhythm. It presents an experiment that investigated the moment of syllabic perceptual anchoring. More than twenty respondents were asked to synchronize production of four similar words in different grammatical forms with metronome beats. The recordings of their attempts reveal the rhythmically most important moment in each word. The description of the experiment is presented against the background of previous research in the area. It shows how the first syllable onset and the second syllable coda influence the position of the rhythmic centre of gravity in Czech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The difficulty of pinpointing a specific event within words that would correspond to the p-centre is well known. The current experiment, investigating the position of p-centres in Czech, aims to replicate the findings from English and several other languages, and substantially increase the range of phonotactic types and the number of participants. In a speech-metronome synchronization task, 24 subjects pronounced a set of 37 natural disyllabic Czech words of differing complexity at two metronome rates. The beginning of the first vowel (V1) and the moment of the fastest increase in energy within the first syllable were the most consistent synchronization points, but the p-centre occurred earlier than at the V1 initial boundary. Synchronization intervals were significantly influenced by the complexity of the syllabic onset: the p-centre was positioned earlier (further from the V1) as more consonants were included in the onset. The effects of vowel length and final coda were also present, but weaker. In addition, various aspects of human musicality were found to correlate with the ability of speakers to synchronize their articulations with an isochronous auditory sequence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the location of several transfer points to serve as collector points for customers who need the services of a facility. For example, demand for emergency services by patients is generated at a set of demand points that need the services of a central facility (such as a hospital). Patients are transferred to a helicopter pad (transfer point) at normal speed, and from there they are transferred to the facility at increased speed. The general model involves the location of multiple transfer points and one facility. Locating one transfer point when the set of demand points and the location of the facility are known was investigated in a previous paper by the authors. In this paper, we apply the results of that paper to solve the problem when the location of the facility is known. Both minisum and minimax versions of the models are investigated both in the plane and on the network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]