@phdthesis{RoncagliaDenissen2013,
  author    = {Roncaglia-Denissen, Maria Paula},
  title     = {The role of first and second language speech rhythm in syntactic ambiguity processing and musical rhythmic aptitude},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-78256},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {vi, 157},
  year      = {2013},
  abstract  = {Rhythm is a temporal and systematic organization of acoustic events in terms of prominence, timing and grouping, helping to structure our most basic experiences, such as body movement, music and speech. In speech, rhythm groups auditory events, e.g., sounds and pauses, together into words, making their boundaries acoustically prominent and aiding word segmentation and recognition by the hearer. After word recognition, the hearer is able to retrieve word meaning form his mental lexicon, integrating it with information from other linguistic domains, such as semantics, syntax and pragmatics, until comprehension is achieved. The importance of speech rhythm, however, is not restricted to word segmentation and recognition only. Beyond the word level rhythm continues to operate as an organization device, interacting with different linguistic domains, such as syntax and semantics, and grouping words into larger prosodic constituents, organized in a prosodic hierarchy. This dissertation investigates the function of speech rhythm as a sentence segmentation device during syntactic ambiguity processing, possible limitations on its use, i.e., in the context of second language processing, and its transferability as cognitive skill to the music domain.},
  language  = {en}
}