3907

Alice Major

Bridges

2020

Poetry has been referred to as 'numbers' from ancient times and the question occurs, “So, what are we counting?" In fact, we have traditionally counted a variety of features, such as the number of lines in stanzas, rhyming words, the rhythmic chunks called “feet,” and, most typically, syllables. However, languages vary widely in how the continuous flow of speech sound should be divided into syllables. Recent research has identified a neural landmark that seems fundamental to processing speech—a change in how fast the amplitude of sound is increasing—which offers the possibility of a consistent marker across languages, and is perhaps the basis for the intuitive sense of counting that poets engage with when they are composing.