{"id":11742,"date":"2024-09-25T15:11:40","date_gmt":"2024-09-25T14:11:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.blopig.com\/blog\/?p=11742"},"modified":"2024-09-27T13:38:36","modified_gmt":"2024-09-27T12:38:36","slug":"the-patterns-that-escape-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blopig.com\/blog\/2024\/09\/the-patterns-that-escape-us\/","title":{"rendered":"The Patterns that Escape Us"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Part The First: An Outrageous Claim<\/h4>\n

Reproduced below is the introductory passage from a psycholinguistics paper, published in the mid-nineties.\nRiveted, as I\u2019m sure you are, having just read that banger opening line to my blog post, humour me and read on; I promise it gets interesting.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

The segmentation problem<\/strong><\/p>\n

The orthography of English has a very simple basis for establishing where words in written texts begin and end: both before and also after every word are empty spaces and this demarcation surely helps the reader comprehend. In a spoken text, however, as presented to a hearer, such explicit segmentation cues are rarely to be found; little pauses after every single word might make things clearer, but the input is continuous – a running stream of sound. This implies that part of listening involves an operation whereby input is segmented, to be processed word by word, for we cannot hold in memory each total collocation, as most sentences we come across are previously unheard. Yet we listeners experience no sense of some dramatic act of separating input into pieces that are known; as we listen to an utterance it seems unproblematic – words in sentences seem just as clear as words that stand alone. Just how listeners accomplish such an effortless division is a question that psychologists have now begun to solve, and this paper will describe (although with minimal precision) some experimental studies showing what it might involve. The findings, as this summary explains, at once can vindicate the order of the problem and the hearer\u2019s sense of ease, for though speech must be segmented, yet the data plainly indicate that rhythm in the input makes segmenting speech a breeze.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Notice any stylistic choices that might be considered odd for a research paper?\nAny particular feature of the word usage that jumps out and you?\nDoes the text seem strangely hard to read?\n(I promise this isn\u2019t a post about \u2018proper writing style\u2019 \u2013 I\u2019d hardly be qualified.)<\/p>\n

OK, how about we try some re-formatting?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The segmentation problem<\/strong>

 The orthography of English has a very simple basis 
for establishing where words in written texts begin and end: 
 both before and also after every word are empty spaces 
 and this demarcation surely helps the reader comprehend.

In a spoken text, however, as presented to a hearer, 
such explicit segmentation cues are rarely to be found; 
little pauses after every single word might make things clearer, 
but the input is continuous - a running stream of sound. 

This implies that part of listening involves an operation 
whereby input is segmented, to be processed word by word, 
for we cannot hold in memory each total collocation,
as most sentences we come across are previously unheard.

Yet we listeners experience no sense of some dramatic 
act of separating input into pieces that are known; 
as we listen to an utterance it seems unproblematic - 
words in sentences seem just as clear as words that stand alone. 

Just how listeners accomplish such an effortless division 
is a question that psychologists have now begun to solve,  
and this paper will describe (although with minimal precision) 
some experimental studies showing what it might involve. 

The findings, as this summary explains, at once can vindicate 
the order of the problem and the hearer's sense of ease, 
for though speech must be segmented, yet the data plainly indicate 
that rhythm in the input makes segmenting speech a breeze.<\/em><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
If it isn\u2019t clear yet, this is perfectly metered verse with rhyming lines; a poem with a very regular rhythm, typeset as prose.\nOnce this rhythm was pointed out to me (or read out, rather), it was impossible to unsee.\nI can hear<\/em> it in my head, when I re-read the original text, it jumps out at me.\nYet, first time round, I completely failed to notice it, despite the stark, obvious, unfailing regularity.\nHow did I miss such an obvious pattern?\nHow could anyone?<\/p>\n
The passage is from a 1994 Cognition<\/em> paper by Anne Cutler, entitled \u2018The perception of rhythm in language\u2019<\/a>.\nYes, the entire three-page thing is written in verse (and is\u2013in my opinion\u2013a delight to read, once you pick up on the rhythm).\nNo, the vast majority of its readers will not have noticed this fact until the text impishly hints at it in the very last paragraph.<\/p>\n
Content-wise, the thrust of the paper is as follows:<\/p>\n
    \n
  1. To understand speech, human brains must somehow chop up continuous audio-stream input into discrete tokens (words) with defined meanings \u2013 otherwise they would have to somehow store a giant hash-table mapping every possible sequence of language sounds to its intended meaning, which seems implausible.\n