Behavioral and brain rhythms in the millisecond-to-second range are central in human
music, speech, and movement. A comparative approach can further our understanding of …

Why does human speech have rhythm? As we cannot travel back in time to witness how
speech developed its rhythmic properties and why humans have the cognitive skills to …

The rhythmic elements of music are integral to experiences such as singing, musical
emotions, the urge to dance and playing a musical instrument. Thus, studies of musical …

Biological predispositions in vocal learning have been proposed to underlie commonalities
in vocal sequences, including for speech and birdsong, but cultural propagation could also …

Pitch is a percept of sound that is based in part on fundamental frequency. Although pitch
can be defined in a way that is clearly separable from other aspects of musical sounds, such …

This editorial serves a number of purposes. First, it aims at summarizing and discussing 33
accepted contributions to the special issue “The evolution of rhythm cognition: Timing in …

The iambic/trochaic law (ITL) asserts that listeners associate louder sounds with group
onsets and longer sounds with group endings. The ITL has interested theoretical …

Both language and music are universal and characteristic for humans. The evolution of the
cognitive abilities underlying language and music are widely debated. A core question is …

Abstract Language and music are universal human traits, raising the question for their
evolutionary origin. This chapter takes a comparative perspective to address that question. It …

Most human language learners acquire language primarily via the auditory modality. This is
one reason why auditory artificial grammars play a prominent role in the investigation of the …