Beyond the Sign. Henri Meschonnic's Poetics of Rhythm and Continuum. Towards an Anthropological Theory of Language

Basing the conception of language on the sign represents also an obstacle to the awareness of certain elements of human life, especially to a full understanding of what language or art do, Henri Meschonnic’s poetics of the continuum and of rhythm criticizes the sign based on Benveniste’s terms of rhythm and discourse, developing an anthropology of language. Rhythm, for Meschonnic, is no formal metrical but a semantic principle, each time unique and unforeseeable. As for Humboldt, his starting point is not the word but the ensemble of speech; language is not ergon but energeia. The poem then is not a literary form but a process of transformation that Meschonnic defines as the invention of a form of life by a form of language and vice versa. Thus a poem is a way of thinking and rhythm is form in movement. The particular subject of art and literature is consequently not the author but a process of subjectivation – this is the contrary of the conception of the sign. By demonstrating the limits of the sign, Meschonnic’s poetics attempts to thematize the intelligibility of presence. Art and literature raise our awareness of this element of human life we cannot grasp conceptually. This poetical thinking is a necessary counterforce against all institutionalization.

Language-universal Sensory Deficits in Developmental Dyslexia: English, Spanish, and Chinese

Studies in sensory neuroscience reveal the critical importance of accurate sensory perception for cognitive development. There is considerable debate concerning the possible sensory correlates of phonological processing, the primary cognitive risk factor for developmental dyslexia. Across languages, children with dyslexia have a specific difficulty with the neural representation of the phonological structure of speech. The identification of a robust sensory marker of phonological difficulties would enable early identification of risk for developmental dyslexia and early targeted intervention. Here, we explore whether phonological processing difficulties are associated with difficulties in processing acoustic cues to speech rhythm. Speech rhythm is used across languages by infants to segment the speech stream into words and syllables. Early difficulties in perceiving auditory sensory cues to speech rhythm and prosody could lead developmentally to impairments in phonology. We compared matched samples of children with and without dyslexia, learning three very different spoken and written languages, English, Spanish, and Chinese. The key sensory cue measured was rate of onset of the amplitude envelope (rise time), known to be critical for the rhythmic timing of speech. Despite phonological and orthographic differences, for each language, rise time sensitivity was a significant predictor of phonological awareness, and rise time was the only consistent predictor of reading acquisition. The data support a language-universal theory of the neural basis of developmental dyslexia on the basis of rhythmic perception and syllable segmentation. They also suggest that novel remediation strategies on the basis of rhythm and music may offer benefits for phonological and linguistic development.

Music, rhythm, rise time perception and developmental dyslexia: Perception of musical meter predicts reading and phonology

Introduction: Rhythm organises musical events into patterns and forms, and rhythm perception in music is usually studied by using metrical tasks. Metrical structure also plays an organisational function in the phonology of language, via speech prosody, and there is evidence for rhythmic perceptual difficulties in developmental dyslexia. Here we investigate the hypothesis that the accurate perception of musical metrical structure is related to basic auditory perception of rise time, and also to phonological and literacy development in children. Methods: A battery of behavioural tasks was devised to explore relations between musical metrical perception, auditory perception of amplitude envelope structure, phonological awareness (PA) and reading in a sample of 64 typically-developing children and children with developmental dyslexia. Results: We show that individual differences in the perception of amplitude envelope rise time are linked to musical metrical sensitivity, and that musical metrical sensitivity predicts PA and reading development, accounting for over 60% of variance in reading along with age and I.Q. Even the simplest metrical task, based on a duple metrical structure, was performed significantly more poorly by the children with dyslexia. Conclusions: The accurate perception of metrical structure may be critical for phonological development and consequently for the development of literacy. Difficulties in metrical processing are associated with basic auditory rise time processing difficulties, suggesting a primary sensory impairment in developmental dyslexia in tracking the lower-frequency modulations in the speech envelope. © 2010 Elsevier.

Questions of 'h' in Northern Ireland: Breathing New Life on the Aspiration Theory

This paper considers existing ideas concerning pronunciation of the letter name for (LNH) in Northern Irish English (NIE). Traditionally, the status of LNH realisation as an ethnic marker has gone unquestioned: Catholics are thought to say [het&Mac186;] while the Protestant norm is assumed to be [etS]. The phonetic difference between these realisations is consistently described as word-initial aspiration versus non-aspiration, with aspiration attributed exclusively to Irish language influence. Here, we show that an explanation based on aspiration alone is phonologically unsatisfying and question whether aspiration is, in fact, an Irish language or ethnically dictated phenomenon. It is further suggested here that the overwhelming stigmatisation of LNH realisation may be responsible for blocking a potential sound change in NIE. While this paper is not intended as a detailed account of ethnolinguistic differences in NI phonology, it engages critically with the over-simplistic and widespread notion that LNH realisation is a result of transfer from the Irish language to the English used by Catholics in Northern Ireland.