Where is the beat

The ability to find the beat in a sequence of auditory events may be linked to the ability to learn vocal communication, raising the question of how beat structure in speech events relates to that in other event sequences. We conducted a series of entrainment experiments designed to compare spoken syllable repetition with tapping. Producing taps to a periodic string of auditorily-presented spoken /pa/ syllables resulted in the tap falling between the release burst for the /p/ and the onset of voicing for the vowel. This is consistent with participants intending to align their taps with the vowel onsets but exhibiting the well-documented Negative Mean Asynchrony (NMA) effect, such that the taps precede their “target.” The finding of alignment with the voicing onset is reminiscent of a large body of work on the P-center in repeated spoken syllables. In contrast, producing repeated utterances of the syllable /pa/ to an auditorily-presented click train resulted in coincident occurrence of the release burst wi...