Language rhythms as assimilated rhythms in the nervous system Free

Electronic studies of neural activity have shown that it is characteristic of brains to assimilate a rhythm from an incoming stimulus, and to maintain an assimilated rhythm through gaps. [E. R. John, Mechanisms of Memory (Academic, New York, 1967), especially pp. 294–343]. In music, a “rest” is a beat supplied by an assimilated rhythm. Rhythmic rests play a role in the typical structure of children's rhymes. A cross‐linguistic study of children's rhymes in such unrelated languages as English, Chinese, Arabic, Nigerian, Southern California Indian, etc., finds the same systematic pattern predominating in all, although cultural borrowing is excluded. This indicates they are shaped to cater to processes that come naturally to the nervous system. [Robbins Burling, “The metrics of children's verses: a cross‐linguistic study,” American Anthropologist, Vol. 68, No. 6, Pt. 2 (Dec. 1966) pp. 1418–1441]. Instances of rests and filled rests, shown by measurements of English verse, demonstrate that the nervous system makes a basic contribution to rhythm patterns, so that in analyzing them we should not think of the rhythm as continually driven by the stimulus.