Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Language and music are structured at multiple temporal scalesand have been characterized as having meter: a hierarchical andperiodic alternation of the prominence of syllables/beats. Meter isthought to emerge from the entrainment of neural oscillators,affording temporal expectations and selective attention. Higher-levels of a metric hierarchy also tend to track syntactic phrasestructure, however, it is not clear within the framework oftemporal attending why this would be advantageous. Neuraloscillations have recently been shown to also track syntacticphrases. We propose that meter aligns to phrase structure so as tomake syntactic processing more efficient. In two experiments(both visual and auditory language), we show that certainalignments of meter to syntax influence sentence comprehensionand we suggest potential mechanisms for why certain alignmentstend to be preferred. Our results underline the rhythmicity of notonly low-level perception but also of higher-level cognitiveprocessing of syntactic sequences.