Looking for Rhythm in Speech

A brief review is provided of the study of rhythm in speech. Much of that activity has focused on looking for empirical measures that would support the categorization of languages into discrete rhythm ‘types’. That activity has had little success, and has used the term ‘rhythm’ in increasingly unmusical and unintuitive ways. Recent approaches to conversation that regard speech as a whole-body activity are found to provide considerations of rhythm that are closer to the central, musical, sense of the term