Rhythm on Your Lips

Rhythm on Your Lips

The Iambic-Trochaic Law (ITL) accounts for speech rhythm, grouping of sounds as either Iambs-if alternating in duration-or Trochees-if alternating in pitch and/or intensity. The two different rhythms signal word order, one of the basic syntactic properties of language. We investigated the extent to which Iambic and Trochaic phrases could be auditorily and visually recognized, when visual stimul...

Please Don't Bring Your Lips so Close

"I could see your lips move": HAL and Speechreading

One of the amazing capabilities of HAL was the ability to speechread (lipread) the crucial conversation between Dave and Frank, where they discussed the possible disconnection of HAL. In this short essay, we briefly discuss the motivation behind computer speechreading, look at the brief history of the field, and describe the current state of computer speechreading research. Finally, we provide ...

Sleep with the Rhythm of your Heart

Arrhythmias during sleep are often detected on routine cardiac monitoring. Specialist cardiology opinion and input is often sought in order to assess whether nocturnal arrhythmias are clinically relevant or not. For the most part, bradyarrhythmias in the young fit individual are a variation of normal and require no further investigations. However even in normal sleep there are cardiovascular di...

Neural modulation: Following your own rhythm

Recent studies of an invertebrate neural circuit show how presynaptic inhibition can play a key role in the generation of oscillatory activity, and can allow the directly affected axon terminal to engage in rhythmic activity independently of the rest of the neuron.