Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Studies of coordination in rhythmic limb movement have established that certain phase relationships among cycling limbs are preferred, i.e. patterns such as synchrony and anti-synchrony are produced more often and more reliably than arbitrary relations. A speech experiment in which subjects attempt to place a phrase-medial stress at a range of phases within an overall phrase repetition cycle is presented, and analogous results are found. Certain phase relations occur more frequently and exhibit greater stability than others. To a first approximation, these phases are predicted by a simple harmonic model. The observed commonalities between limb movements and spoken rhythm support Leishley's conjecture that a common control strategy underlies the coordination of all rhythmic activity.