Chapter 6. Speech Rhythm and Temporal Structure

In this chapter, we present data from phonological processing in developmental dyslexia. We suggest that dyslexia data can offer a novel yet converging perspective on temporal structure and speech rhythm. The dyslexia data addresses the acoustic basis of rhythm perception and of rhythmic synchronisation, considering the potential role of the amplitude modulation (AM) structure of the speech envelope. We argue that a consideration of the perceptual effects of the rise times in the amplitude envelope and the phase relations between different temporal rates of AM may be theoretically productive. Recent work in auditory neuroscience suggests that amplitude modulation is also important for the neural entrainment of oscillatory neuronal networks, which play a role in speech encoding.