UC Merced

Repeated sound sequences in language occur all the time, but we reliably notice them in popular poetic devices like alliteration, assonance, and rhyme. We leverage their sound structures in acquiring our vocabularies as children, and in our most prized literary works. Verbal sound patterns can even serve to scaffold music-like structure within language. Indeed, humans seem to find music-like verbal patterns compelling and productive enough to spend effort including them in rhetoric, poetry, lyrics, and advertisements throughout history. Yet, understandings of their forms and dynamics are still quite limited. In particular, rap rhymes often sport dense phonological patterns whose complexity has been shown to increase over time, yet commensurate analysis has not followed. Lyrical data from rap will therefore serve as the target of much of the current investigation. Much like producing language or music, producing complex phonologically patterned speech is a skill that, in and of itself, is worthy of investigation. I will introduce visualization and computational tools to explore various exemplar data and their sound structures, framing many of the findings in terms of cognition.