La disminución de dopamina en los ganglios basales es la principal causa de la enfermedad de Parkinson. Además de las disfunciones motrices, los individuos con EP presentan alteraciones cognitivas que incluyen déficits de control atencional y temporal, de percepción del ritmo de la música y del habla, y de procesamiento del lenguaje. El circuito estriado-tálamo-cortical, participa en la comprensión musical y del habla. Personas con EP presentan problemas en distinguir las estructuras rítmicas por verse afectado el funcionamiento de los GB (...) y, por lo tanto, el control de su pulso interno en el CETC. Sin embargo, se ha encontrado que personas con EP pueden mejorar su sincronización temporal interna mediante el acompañamiento de señales auditivas externas temporalmente predecibles. Estudios argumentan que señales de este tipo pueden compensar la vía disfuncional CETC mediante una interface con el circuito cerebelo-tálamo-cortical el cual es sensible a la codificación de eventos temporales. (shrink)

Este artículo presenta un estudio descriptivo, cuyo propósito es determinar si el comportamiento rítmico del habla en lectura en voz alta de personas profesionales de ocho ciudades diferentes de Chile coincide con la clasificación dada históricamente al español como lengua de ritmo silábico, clasificación que además en general se extiende a todas las lenguas romances. Varios estudios tradicionales afirman que el español es una lengua de tendencia hacia el ritmo silábico, no obstante, también existen otros trabajos, antiguos y recientes, que (...) afirman lo contrario, esto es, que el español manifiesta un comportamiento rítmico de tipo acentual. Hasta el momento, no se ha realizado un estudio de este tipo sobre este tema para el español de Chile. En el presente trabajo, se analiza un corpus de lecturas obtenidas de una muestra de 30 informantes de distintas regiones del país. El análisis se realiza con procedimientos de medición instrumental que entregan indicadores cuantitativos que han sido propuestos recientemente en el ámbito de la investigación sobre prosodia y que le otorgan, además, mayor precisión y objetividad a los estudios acerca de este tema. Los resultados muestran que en el español de Chile, en la lectura en voz alta, se manifiesta una tendencia rítmica de tipo silábico, aunque comparativamente tiende a ser más acentual que los valores que se han dado para el español peninsular. En cuanto a la variación del español de Chile por zona geográfica, las diferencias son tan pequeñas que no es posible afirmar que la variable diatópica influye en el comportamiento rítmico del español de Chile, en situación de lectura. (shrink)

Relationships between phonological and morphological complexity have long been proposed in the linguistic literature, with empirical investigations often seeking complexity trade-offs. Positive complexity correlations tend not to be viewed in terms of motivations. We argue that positive complexity correlations can be diachronically well-motivated, emerging from crosslinguistically prevalent processes of language change. We examine the correlation between syllable complexity and morphological synthesis, hypothesizing that the process of grammaticalization motivates a positive relationship between the two features. To test this, we conduct a (...) typological survey of 95 diverse languages and a corpus study of 21 languages with substantive corpora from the DoReCo project. The first study establishes a significant positive correlation between syllable complexity, measured in terms of maximal syllable patterns, and the index of synthesis. The second study tests the hypothesis that the relationship between syllable complexity and synthesis holds at local levels and within noun and verb types, as predicted by a grammaticalization account. While the findings of the corpus study are limited in their statistical power, the observed tendencies are consistent with our predictions. This study contributes important findings to the complexity literature, as well as a novel method which incorporates broad typological sampling and deep corpus analysis. (shrink)

When infants and toddlers are confronted with sequences of sounds, they are required to segment the sounds into meaningful units to achieve sufficient understanding. Rhythm has been regarded as a crucial cue for segmentation of speech sounds. Although previous intermodal methods indicated that infants and toddlers could detect differences in speech sounds based on stress-timed and syllable-timed units, these methods could not clearly indicate how infants and toddlers perform sound segmentation. Thus, the present study examined whether Japanese infants and toddlers (...) could segment word speech sounds comprising basic morae, on the basis of concurrent basic mora units within syllable units, using the new intermodal matching procedure. The results indicated that, regardless of their ages and linguistic abilities, Japanese infants and toddlers aged 6–25 months tended to segment Japanese words comprising basic morae sounds on the basis of concurrent basic mora units within syllable units. This implies that infants' and toddlers' use of syllable units for segmentation of speech sounds at an early age could be evident among many infants and toddlers learning various languages. Although this finding should be interpreted carefully, the present study demonstrated the utility of the new intermodal matching procedure for examining segmentation of speech sounds and word sounds by infants and toddlers, on the basis of specific rhythm units. (shrink)

The most important stage of the sound phenomenon for children covers the time that starts from the mother's womb and continues until the school period. A child starting school (6:5 or 7 years old) is just learning to write. However, he acquired the language/s/ almost entirely thanks to the sound in the mentioned period. In this respect, the processing of language and sound in the brain of newborn babies becomes important. The language acquisition level of newborns may vary in terms (...) of such reasons as genetics, ability, and frequency of exposure, environmental factors, and whether they are physically and mentally healthy or not. This study deals with the question of what kind of a connection is there between the phenomenon of sound, especially the sound of music, and the acquisition of two languages in early childhood. In short, the subjects of language acquisition and musical sound in early childhood have been investigated in the literature with a qualitative method. Another question is how do the two languages acquired in early childhood stay with each other in a developmental relation. In the study, it was understood that there is not a single result from the studies on children grown up monolingual or bilingual in early childhood. The opinion that the sooner one or two languages are learned in early childhood (usually by exposure to the sound) the better the acquisition would be is outweighed, though there are different opinions about the results of the scientists. In addition, since it was concluded that there is a developmentally parallel relationship between the sound of music and the acquisition of language by newborns, it means that ontology gives us the summary of phylogenesis. (shrink)