Browsing by Subject "Rhythm"
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Item A study of rhythm in Conrad's The secret agent.(Texas Tech University, 1974-08) Morales, Catherine PhillipsNot availableItem Exercise training and sleep quality in young adults from the training interventions and genetics of exercise response (TIGER) study(2014-12) Harp, Celina Jeanne; Bray, Molly S.Study Objectives. Sleep is regulated by internal mechanisms that respond to environmental cues. Physical activity is one external cue that can affect sleep. It has been suggested that exercise affects sleep in a variety of ways, including influencing neurotransmitter levels and altering circadian rhythms. The purpose of this study was to examine self-reported sleep quality both before and after a well- defined exercise protocol. Design, Setting, and Participants. The TIGER study involves a 15-week aerobic exercise intervention conducted in young adults (n=2,027, mean age 21.8 ± 5 y). Participants were required to engage in 30 minutes of aerobic exercise at 65-85% maximal heart rate reserve three times/week. Multivariate regression was used to identify factors associated with sleep quality and duration. Measurements and Results. Multiple measures of body size/composition, heart rate (HR), and blood pressure (BP) were obtained on all participants. Sleep quality and duration were accessed via a condensed sleep quality profile (SQP). Prior to exercise, age (p<0.001), gender (p<0.008) and overweight/obesity status (p<0.001), but not race/ethnicity, were all significantly associated with SQP score. Age (p<0.002), and race/ethnicity (p<0.05) were significantly associated with sleep duration, with African Americans and Hispanics having significantly shorter sleep times compared to non-Hispanic whites. SQP score was not significantly different following chronic exercise training. Conclusions. Although overweight/obesity groups had significantly different sleep quality scores before and after exercise, sleep quality did not change for subjects after 15 weeks of aerobic exercise intervention.Item Heart rate entrainment to external auditory rhythm: A pilot study(2017-04-18) Way, Michael Harrison; Dachinger, Carolyn; Miller, Karen; Henderson, CraigHeart rate entrainment to external auditory rhythm has numerous applications to clinical music therapy practice, including increasing arousal or inducing relaxation. However, research regarding the ability of heart rate to entrain to external auditory stimuli is contradictory or incomplete, leading to questions regarding this phenomenon. Thus, the current study was conducted to investigate if heart rate can entrain to external auditory stimuli. Eighty-four participants were randomly placed into three testing groups. The baseline heart rate of each participant was measured over a 5 minute period, then, depending on the group, 7%, 10% or 15% was subtracted from the baseline to get the target heart rate. An external auditory stimulus was then played at the target rate for a 15 minute period while heart rate was continuously monitored. Results indicated that there is a possibility of heart rate entrainment at the 7% and 10% level, with statistically significant differences observed between the 7% and 10% groups as well as the 7% and 15% groups. These results align with ideas from previous research and can act as the groundwork for future research exploring heart rate entrainment to other forms of auditory stimuli. The findings from this research could also be used to help music therapists select tempi that are appropriate for relaxation interventions. These findings could also be used for additional research investigating the use of heart rate entrainment as a physiological indicator of consciousness in patients under the disorders of consciousness umbrella.Item An investigation of asymmetries of rhythm in speech production(2015-05) Terzenbach, Lauren M.; Myers, Scott P.; Smiljanic, Rajka; Sussman, Harvey; Gilden, David; Costa-Giomi, EugeniaThe human experience is filled with rhythmicity. From coordinated motor movements to memory recollection, humans use rhythmic patterns to accomplish a multitude of activities. In addition to internally regulated rhythmicity such as locomotion, humans are capable of synchronization to outside rhythmic stimuli as well. They use rhythm, both internal and external, in order to fine-tune common tasks of movement, perception, and memory. Rhythm is an integral part of language, manifesting as linguistic stress. Most of the world’s languages have a binary stress pattern, with an alternation of strong and weak beats. But there are a handful of languages that have been documented with a ternary stress pattern, where there is a lapse of two weak beats between strong beats. Linguists have tackled the question of how to theoretically represent ternary rhythm, but no one has answered the question why such a stark asymmetry between binary and ternary stress patterns exists in languages. This dissertation addresses that question by investigating how speech production is influenced by binary and ternary rhythmic patterns. Four production experiments used tongue twisters to look at error rate in binary and ternary meter. The first experiment presented 12 syllable long tongue twisters that subjects read as quickly as possible. Participants produced significantly more errors on ternary meter tongue twisters than on binary (p = 0.0003). In the second experiment, binary and ternary tongue twisters were presented aurally, with the subject repeating the stimulus for 5 seconds. Participants again produced significantly more errors in ternary meter than in binary meter (p = 0.021). In the third experiment, stress position was altered to first syllable, last syllable, or no stress. Ternary meter produced more errors than binary (p = 0.038). In the fourth experiment, binary and ternary rhythmic patterns were combined with binary and ternary syllable sequences to make matched or mismatched stimuli. In this instance, subjects produced fewer errors in ternary than in binary meter (p = 0.054). The results of three of the four experiments point to a binary rhythm preference in motor planning and control for speech production.Item The long line of the Middle English alliterative revival : rhythmically coherent, metrically strict, phonologically English(2012-05) Psonak, Kevin Damien; Cable, Thomas, 1942-; Henkel, Jacqueline M.; Hinrichs, Lars; Lesser, Wayne; King, Robert D.This study contributes to the search for metrical order in the 90,000 extant long lines of the late fourteenth-century Middle English Alliterative Revival. Using the 'Gawain'-poet's 'Patience' and 'Cleanness', it refutes nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars who mistook rhythmic liveliness for metrical disorganization and additionally corrects troubling missteps that scholars have taken over the last five years. 'Chapter One: Tame the "Gabble of Weaker Syllables"' rehearses the traditional, but mistaken view that long lines are barely patterned at all. It explains the widely-accepted methods for determining which syllables are metrically stressed and which are not: Give metrical stress to the syllables that in everyday Middle English were probably accented. 'Chapter Two: An Environment for Demotion in the B-Verse' introduces the relatively stringent metrical template of the b-verse as a foil for the different kind of meter at work in the a-verse. 'Chapter Three: Rhythmic Consistency in the Middle English Alliterative Long Line' examines the structure of the a-verse and considers the viability of verses with more than the normal two beats. An empirical investigation considers whether rhythmic consistency in the long line depends on three-beat a-verses. 'Chapter Four: Dynamic "Unmetre" and the Proscription against Three Sequential Iambs' posits an explanation for the unusual distributions of metrically unstressed syllables in the long line and finds that the 'Gawain'-poet's rhythms avoid the even alternation of beats and offbeats with uncanny precision. 'Chapter Five: Metrical Promotion, Linguistic Promotion, and False Extra-Long Dips' takes the rest of the dissertation as a foundation for explaining rhythmically puzzling a-verses. A-verses that seem to have excessively long sequences of offbeats and other a-verses that infringe on b-verse meter prove amenable to adjustment through metrical promotion. 'Conclusion: Metrical Regions in the Long Line' synthesizes the findings of the previous chapters in a survey of metrical tension in the long line. It additionally articulates the key theme of the dissertation: Contrary to traditional assumptions, Middle English alliterative long lines have variable, instead of consistent, numbers of beats and highly regulated, instead of liberally variable, arrangements of metrically unstressed syllables.Item Measuring phonetic convergence : segmental and suprasegmental speech adaptations during native and non-native talker interactions(2013-12) Rao, Gayatree Nandan; Diehl, Randy L.; Smiljanic, Rajka, 1967-Phonetic convergence (PC) is speech specific accommodation characterized by an increase in similarity in a dyad’s speech patterns due to an interaction. Previous research has demonstrated that PC occurs in dyads during various interactive tasks (e.g. map completion and picture matching) and in cross-linguistic conditions (e.g. dyads who speak the same or different native language) (Pardo, 2006; Kim et al., 2011). Studies suggest that speakers who are closer in linguistic distance (i.e. share the same native language) are more likely to converge than speakers who are far apart (i.e. speak different native languages) (Kim et al, 2011). However, Interdialectal conditions where speakers use different national dialects of the same language have been studied to a far lesser extent (Babel, 2010). Similarly, studies have examined both segmental and suprasegmental features that are susceptible to PC but rhythm has not been studied extensively (Krivokapic, 2013; Rao et al., 2011). Though initial studies postulated that PC is the result of either automatic or social processes, more current research suggests that a combination of both kinds of processes may be better able to account for PC (Goldinger, 1997; Shepard et al., 2001; Babel, 2009a). The current dissertation uses novel measures such as Interlocutor Similarity and EMS + centroid to implicate global properties of vowels and rhythm respectively as acoustic correlates of PC. Moreover, it finds that speakers showed both convergence and divergence in vowels and rhythm as moderated by their language background. Close interactions between native speakers of American English (AE) resulted in convergence whereas interdialectal interactions (between AE and Indian English speakers) and mixed language interactions (between native and non-native speakers of AE who are native speakers of SP) resulted in both convergence and divergence. The results from this study may shed light on how speakers attenuate the highly variable nature of speech by adapting speech patterns to aid intelligibility and information sharing (Shepard et al., 2001) and that this attenuation is moderated by social demands such as identity and cultural distinctiveness.Item Rhetoric and rhythm in Byzantine homilies(2007) Valiavitcharska, Vessela Venelinova; Walker, Jeffrey; Woods, Marjorie Curry, 1947-My dissertation seeks to bring more attention to speech patterns and rhythm in oratory -- issues that have long been on the fringes of rhetoric scholars' concerns -- by arguing that prose rhythm in Byzantine and Old Slavic sermons was an important tool not only in creating an overall aesthetic experience but also in promoting shared meaning and individual persuasion. The first chapter offers a comparison between the clauses of early to middle Byzantine homilies and their translations into Old Church Slavonic, within a corpus of texts contained in the late tenth-century Codex Suprasliensis. The comparison shows a remarkable correspondence between the number of syllables and accents per clause in both languages. I conclude that the Slavonic translators strove not only to provide literal translations, but also to preserve the rhythmical patterns of the original homilies. The second chapter explores the classical and late antique theoretical underpinnings of rhythm in general and prose rhythm in particular and argues that in late antiquity there was a strong tradition of differentiation between rhythm and meter. Prose rhythm was considered the domain of the rhythmicians (not metricians) and defined by word arrangement and cadence. I argue that the word and its main accent were perceived as the basic unit of prose rhythm -- in addition to clausularcadence, which so far has been considered the main carrier of rhythm. Thus homiletic prose rhythm resembles the accentual rhythms of Byzantine liturgical poetry. Chapter 3 examines Byzantine rhetorical commentaries and scholia on classical literature and concludes that the Byzantine teachers taught accentual rhythm by looking for regular accentual patterns in classical Greek texts and pointing them out to their students, who in turn internalized and reproduced them in their own compositions. My last chapter argues that the same principles were found in the first Slavonic translations of Greek homilies. I conclude that the persistent recurrence of similar rhythmical patterns, even across national and linguistic boundaries, may lead us to think of rhythm as a meaning-bearing component of oratory.Item Selected motor movements as an indicator of rhythmic capacity(Texas Tech University, 1976-08) Brand, Diane CNot available