Do you hear a regular beat da-DUM, da-DUM? This rhythm is very common in poetry and it even has a name: it’s called iambic. Poets often choose to write in this rhythm. Rhythm can help to strengthen ...

You’ve heard of rhyme schemes, the various ways you can arrange sounds to link lines and create sequences of motion. In this article, I want to look at rhythm’s ability to do the same thing: sometimes ...

Neuroscientists at UC San Francisco have discovered how the listening brain scans speech to break it down into syllables. The findings provide for the first time a neural basis for the fundamental ...

When we hear a sentence, or a line of poetry, our brains automatically transform the stream of sound into a sequence of syllables. But scientists haven't been sure exactly how the brain does this. Now ...

Children with dyslexia often find it difficult to count the number of syllables in spoken words or to determine whether words rhyme. These subtle difficulties are seen across languages with different ...

We know that a poem does not have to rhyme. But if it doesn't, how do we know it's a poem and not just a piece of prose? We recognise a poem by its rhythmical lines. Rhythm is the musical quality of a ...