Madame Nia CASON / Docteur

Music and speech are both reliant on the way that events occur in time. Dynamic attending through a mechanism of coupled oscillators (internal) with external regularity (acoustic signal) may be a process not only important in music perception (Jones & Boltz, 1989, Large & Jones, 1999), but also during speech perception (Arantes & Barbosa, 2010; Port, 2003). There may therefore be common, domain-general processes underlying prediction in time. Since musical rhythm can provide a greater regularity than speech, it may be able to boost domain-general processes important for the perception of speech. In other words, rhythmic priming (providing rhythmical cues for speech rhythm) may enhance speech processing since it allows the structure of speech to be made predictable. We have investigated this for the phonological processing of spoken pseudowords (Cason & Schön, 2012), spoken sentences (Cason, Astésano & Schön, submitted), and have investigated the impact of rhythmic priming in hearing impaired children(Cason, Hidalgo & Schön, submitted).