The Cat in the Hat: Musical and linguistic metric structure realization in child-directed poetry

Children’s nursery rhymes represent an intersection of music and language. In the current talk, I’ll describe recent work from my lab demonstrating the realization of systematic musical structure in acoustic measures of a corpus of adult productions of Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat, a quintessential example of metrically-regular, rhyming children’s poetry.

First, we show that duration variation based on metric structure in the spoken corpus is similar to expressive duration variation based on metric phrasing structure in music, such that longer word (and similarly, note) durations are associated with higher positions in a metric tree structure. Second, we show that intensity variation based on a 6/8 musical meter in the spoken corpus is similar to expressive intensity variation in 6/8 meter in music performance, such that words (and notes) associated with beat 1 are produced with the greatest intensity, words (and notes) associated with beat 4 are produced with moderate intensity, and words (and notes) associated with beats 2, 3, 5, & 6 are produced with the least intensity. Finally, we show that pitch measures correspond to both metric phrasing structure and metric accent structure.

In summary, these results demonstrate the close relationship between music and language that is realized in children’s poetry. Moreover, they give us insight into the mechanisms by which adult productions of children’s books like The Cat in the Hat provide a cognitive benefit to child listeners.