Rhythmic constraints on stress timing in English

What kind of embodied constraints affect the production of speech? Can we say anything we like when we like, or are there constraints in play that make some things easier than others? This is the question asked in Cummins & Port (1998) which we recently read in lab meeting (with our PhD student Agnes).

Cummins and Port asked participants to produce sentences over and over and examined when during the cycle a certain stress beat occurred. They set it up so that the beat was timed with a beep to occur throughout the cycle, but showed that people could actually only place the beat in 2 or 3 places in the beat reliably. The big picture result is that speech production is shaped, in part, by the underlying dynamics of production described in terms of the rhythms it is set up to produce.

The nice detail here comes from the theoretical set up and analysis that drives this study. Cummins and Port are directly inspired and guided by work in coordination dynamics. Agnes is interested in this work because she's looking at ways to investigate language and speech using the tools of dynamical systems and embodied cognition - remember, our big pitch is that language is special but not magical and we should be able to study it the way we study, say, rhythmic movement coordination. 

Embodying Culture: My ongoing conversation with Soliman & Glenberg

Would a formal reply make me this guy?

I've been exchanging views with Art Glenberg and his colleagues about a paper he published recently in Frontiers. I reviewed it, had reservations but eventually let it through, then published my concerns as a commentary on the original paper. Soliman and Glenberg (2014; S&G) then replied to my reply which I didn't know about until I noticed the commentary had a citation in my Google Scholar profile. 

I could simply publish a reply to their reply, but to be honest I'm not sure it's worth it; it feels a little too much like arguing on the internet. I'll link to this in the comments section of the Frontiers page, however, and if people think it's worth the DOI then I'll write this reply up as a formal submission. I'd be interested to hear from you all on this.

The short version of my reply is that in the process of dodging my criticism they concede it applies to them, and they swerve into a literature that doesn't help. I do think they've applied some serious and valuable consideration to the details of their proposal, though, so I think this has been a useful process.