Research

Research in the CAPSlab explores the psychological and neurological processing of rhythm and meter in speech production and perception. Through the lens of human language production and comprehension, we study the psychological reality of auditory imagery, and the role it plays in language perception and reading acquisition. In addition, we explore how prosodic features are produced and perceived across languages, and what cues differentiate speech from song.


Implicit prosody affects on-line reading

An enduring question in cognitive psychology is about the reality of imagery and the extent to which imagined representations are similar to perceived ones. Our work shows similarities in the processing of real and imagined sound representations. We demonstrate that readers encounter processing difficulty when their expectations about lexical stress patterns are not realized during silent reading. Eye-tracking experiments show that when participants were induced by context to expect a word with a weak-strong stress pattern, they slowed down when they read a word with a strong-weak pattern. Event-related potential studies show that neural responses to unexpected lexical stress patterns encountered during reading are similar in timing and scalp distribution to those elicited by spoken words with unexpected stress patterns during listening

Breen M, Fitzroy AB, Oraa Ali M. Event-Related Potential Evidence of Implicit Metric Structure during Silent Reading. Brain Sci. 2019 Aug 8;9(8) PubMed Central PMCID: PMC6721353.

Breen M. Empirical investigations of the role of implicit prosody in sentence processing. Language and Linguistics Compass. 2014; 8(2):37-50

Breen M, Clifton C Jr. Stress matters revisited: a boundary change experiment. Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2013;66(10):1896-909. PubMed Central PMCID: PMC3661722

Breen M, Clifton C Jr. Stress Matters: Effects of Anticipated Lexical Stress on Silent Reading. J Mem Lang. 2011 Feb 1;64(2):153-170. PubMed Central PMCID: PMC3375729

Metric structure in literacy development

Literacy experts have long suggested that rhythmic, rhyming children’s books promote literacy because they emphasize the association between letters and sounds. To clarify the contribution that nursery rhymes make to early reading skill, we first need to understand what type of information readers of nursery rhymes are exposed to through their interaction with metrically-regular, rhyming texts, and how this information differs from prose. Moreover, because children routinely hear these texts before they read them, we need to understand how they are produced by readers. We explore how adult speakers cue linguistic structure in children’s poetic texts and demonstrate how adult readers use pitch, duration, and intensity variation to signal hierarchical metric structure, lexical frequency, syntactic structure, and text emphasis. We have also recently demonstrated that the same acoustic features that are used to cue metric structure in English texts are also used by Spanish speakers reading a Spanish children's book. This work shows that, across languages, through highly rhythmic, rhyming texts, pre-reading children are exposed to a rich set of linguistic cues that they can use to make strong predictions about when important information will occur, suggesting the mechanism by which these texts support reading acquisition.

Breen M, Garcia S, Franck G, Antonio Lopez L, Fitzroy AB. Spanish readers signal hierarchical metric structure in spoken productions of 'El Gato Ensombrerado,' a Spanish translation of 'The Cat in the Hat'. Annual Meeting of the Psychonomics Society; 2021 November

Breen M, Fitzroy AB. Pitch cues to hierarchical metric structure in children’s poetry. Future Directions of Music Cognition; 2021 June 28; Columbus, OH, USA. Available from: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/HZVJU

Fitzroy AB, Breen M. Metric Structure and Rhyme Predictability Modulate Speech Intensity During Child-Directed and Read-Alone Productions of Children's Literature. Lang Speech. 2020 Jun;63(2):292-305. PubMed PMID: 31074328.

Breen M. Effects of metric hierarchy and rhyme predictability on word duration in The Cat in the Hat. Cognition. 2018 May;174:71-81. PubMed PMID: 29425988.

Resolving ambiguity in speech and song

Listeners quickly and effortlessly categorize human sounds as speech or song, but there is considerable question about the cues that they use to do this, and how individuals differ in this process. The speech-to-song illusion is a phenomenon whereby some speech samples, with repetition, transform so that they sound like song. We've observed that listeners are more likely to hear speech segments as song when a) the onsets of the syllables create a regular rhythm, b) the relationships between pitches of the syllables are similar to those of western musical traditions, and c) the pitches of syllables are flat. We have also demonstrated that while musical experience itself does not predict the likelihood that an individual will perceive the illusion, an individual's ability to correctly identify rhythm and pitch deviations in music and speech correlates with the strength of the illusion.

Tierney A, Patel AD, Breen M. Acoustic foundations of the speech-to-song illusion. J Exp Psychol Gen. 2018 Jun;147(6):888-904. PubMed PMID: 29888940

Tierney A, Patel A, Breen M. Repetition enhances the musicality of speech and tone stimuli to similar degrees. Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal. 2018; 35(5):573-578. DOI:10.1525/mp.2018.35.5.573

Tierney A, Patel AD, Jasmin K, Breen M. Individual differences in perception of the speech-to-song illusion are linked to musical aptitude but not musical training. J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2021 Dec;47(12):1681-1697. doi: 10.1037/xhp0000968. PubMed PMID: 34881953. 

Prosody predicts reading comprehension ability

Extensive work in literacy has demonstrated that children who have good prosody tend to also have good comprehension abilities. Most of this work has been carried out with children, who are still developing as readers, but very little has focused on high school students, who are already considered to be reading experts. In a large-scale investigation of high school students, we show that poor comprehenders are less likely to pause at syntactic boundaries than good comprehenders and are not as proficient at percieving prosodic cues to syntactic and semantic structure. These studies further expand our understanding of the connection between speech production and perception and reading comprehension.

Landi N, Kaswer L, Ryherd K, Van Dyke J, Krivokapic J, Breen M. Use of prosodic cues is impaired in poor comprehenders. 25th Annual Meeting of the Society for Scientific Study of Reading; 2018 July; Brighton, UK

Breen M, Van Dyke J, Krivokapić J, Landi N. Prosodic features in production reflect reading comprehension skill in high school students. J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2024 Apr 22. doi: 10.1037/xlm0001355. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 38647458.

Breen M, Kaswer L, Van Dyke JA, Krivokapic J. Imitated prosodic fluency predicts reading comprehension ability in good and poor high school readers. Frontiers in psychology. 2016; 7:1026. DOI: doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.0102



Acoustic correlates of prosodic categories

In my doctoral work, I investigated the acoustic realization of accents and phrase boundaries, using multi-level modeling to investigate the role of duration, pitch, and intensity and the production of these linguistic elements. I explored how speakers use accents to signal different types of focused elements to listeners, demonstrating that focused words are consistently signaled with longer duration, higher pitch, and greater intensity, regardless of where in the sentence the focus occurs, but also that speakers signal different types of focus (contrastive vs. new; wide vs. narrow) with acoustic variation. In two other studies, I showed that speakers use longer duration, lower pitch, and lower intensity to signal phrase boundaries, but that the presence of these boundaries also depends on the semantic/syntactic context as well as the length of syntactic constituents that are separated by the phrase boundary. This work not only informs our understanding of speech production processes and realization of prosody through acoustics, but also informs our understanding of the semantic categories that are routinely cued by speakers and should therefore be included in any theoretical model of information status.

Breen M, Watson DG, Gibson E. Intonational phrasing is constrained by meaning, not balance. Language and Cognitive Processes. 2011; 26(10):1532-1562. DOI:10.1080/01690965.2010.508878

Breen M, Fedorenko E, Wagner M, Gibson E. Acoustic correlates of information structure. Language and Cognitive Processes. 2010; 25(7):1044-1098. DOI: 10.1080/01690965.2010.504378

Watson DG, Breen M, Gibson E. The role of syntactic obligatoriness in the production of intonational boundaries. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition. 2006; 32(5):1045-1056. DOI: 10.1037/0278-7393.32.5.1045