ICREA, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Will present the talk entitled:

Extracting rhythmic structures from music and language: Exploring what is, and what is not, shared with other species

Abstract

Rhythm is a key feature in both music and language. It is however unknown the extent to which humans rely on highly specialized, uniquely-human, mechanisms for its processing. In this presentation, I will review studies exploring this issue along four different lines of enquire. These will cover the grouping principles described by the Iambic-Trochaic Law, the use of prosodic cues for language discrimination, domain-specificity of rhythm synchronization through neural entrainment, and the detection of temporal regularities in music. Most of the experiments that I will present have been done with rats, a distant relative of humans that does not display complex vocalizations. The results thus speak about the possibility that important aspects of how humans process rhythm have emerged from general sensitivities shared across species.

Location: Online (Teams).  Click here to join the meeting