This chapter uses the examples of marriages by deaf people in this period to examine how ideas about deafness operated in practice. Records show that most prelingually deaf people were able to marry using signs, and that clergy generally accepted signed vows as evidence of intention and consent. Some of these cases, however, reveal points of vulnerability: signed communication could be misread, manipulated, or deliberately reinterpreted by those with an interest in challenging a marriage’s validity. The chapter also considers how wealthy families responded when a deaf person was an heir. Rather than inventing new legal mechanisms, families relied on the well-established device of the strict settlement to secure property, guide inheritance, and provide structured support for the deaf heir. Together, these practices show that while prejudice and misinterpretation persisted, deaf people were able to marry and inherit within familiar legal frameworks, revealing a more flexible and inclusive system than has often been assumed.

This chapter explores how early modern understandings of deafness were shaped by the interaction of new anatomical knowledge with older medical theories. Advances in the study of the ear helped to establish deafness as a primarily physical condition rather than a marker of impaired intellect. The speechlessness of deaf people was seen as the consequence of deafness, rather than a cognitive disability. Humoural medicine influenced the interpretation of these discoveries, and suggested that all forms of deafness existed along a single continuum. This fluidity may have softened the legal implications traditionally attached to prelingual deafness. At the same time, because age-related deafness was the most common form of deafness, this was the lens through which most people imagined prelingual deafness. The chapter argues that this combination of medical theory and social experience profoundly influenced how deafness was conceptualised in early modern England.

This chapter challenges the long-standing view that the orality of the law in early modern England meant that deaf people were denied a legal personhood because they could neither hear to understand nor speak to give their consent. While prejudice about deaf people’s intellectual capacity persisted, legal records show a growing acceptance of sign language as a legitimate alternative to vocal speech. Courts increasingly recognised that consent could be communicated through signs, allowing deaf individuals to make contracts, convey property, give evidence, and make binding decisions. The process was uneven: some magistrates questioned the credibility of deaf people or their signs, and procedures varied across jurisdictions. Yet by the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, both civil and criminal cases demonstrate an acceptance that signed communication could establish understanding and rational capacity. Rather than excluding deaf people from legal personhood, the period reveals a gradual but significant expansion of their recognised agency, reshaping assumptions about speech, reason, and participation in the law.

This chapter explores how early modern philosophers used deafness to probe the nature of language, knowledge and human rationality. Contemporaries tested the idea that vocal speech was a marker of reason by teaching deaf people to speak vocally. This chapter focuses on the efforts of linguists, and philosophers to teach two young deaf men, Alexander Popham and Daniel Whalley, in seventeenth-century Oxford. This chapter examines how deaf signers inspired the parallel project of developing a universal or ‘philosophical’ language. Encounters with deaf individuals, including those observed by John Wallis, prompted some academics to change their mind about the eloquence of signed communication, and to reconsider whether speech was the only valid expression of rational thought. Deaf people thus became central to debates about how humans acquire knowledge, whether language shapes cognition, and what forms of expression could signify full participation in human society.

This chapter focuses on learner corpora of L2 English and the analysis of learner language varieties. The first part of the chapter describes the main characteristics of learner corpus data and presents a survey of the aspects that have most often been dealt with in the literature within the frame of learner corpus research (LCR) and its three main research orientations (descriptive, predictive, and pedagogical). A number of representative studies are selected to illustrate various facets of LCR. The chapter then describes the methods that are typically used in LCR, including multimethod approaches. It identifies the recent advances in LCR as well as the challenges that it still needs to address in terms of data collection, methodology, linguistic analysis, and applications. In the second part of the chapter, the main aspects of LCR are illustrated in an empirical study that the authors conducted on the use of discourse markers (DMs) in learner spoken English. The study compares six frequent two-word DMs (and so, and then, I mean, in fact, sort of, you know) in native and learner speech, both from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. The study considers individual texts in addition to entire corpora, showing that corpora may display a high degree of internal variability.

Within the aletheistic tradition, Aquinas thinks creation, as a linguistic act, involves the theme of interpersonal manifestation. He is therefore able to overcome the apparent artificiality of Anselm’s linguistic ostension by setting the deferred ostension back into both the structure of created being and the natural longing for happiness.

The distinctive morphology of the Neandertal midface has long intrigued researchers. A comprehensive understanding of their upper airways, encompassing the nasal cavity and paranasal sinuses, is essential for unraveling Neandertal paleobiology. These airways are integral to vital functions such as respiration, olfaction, and speech. Analyzing their structural interconnections across various craniofacial units sheds light on Neandertal skeletal anatomy and evolutionary dynamics. This review delves into recent studies exploring respiratory air conditioning, olfaction, and metabolic functions associated with the nasal and paranasal cavities. Additionally, it examines hypotheses and research pertaining to phonation and speech involving the pharynx and larynx. Lastly, the review scrutinizes the overall airway structure, its morphological aspects, growth patterns, and relationships within the Neandertal craniofacial system, considering the organism’s energetic demands.

Ignatius Sancho had a rich artistic life, from music to literary criticism to engagement with the theater. Unfortunately, little is known about the latter – Joseph Jekyll’s 1782 short biography of Sancho offers only a few sentences about what appears to have been a failed attempt at playing the titular leads of William Shakespeare’s Othello and Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko. However, Jekyll’s biography offers an important window into eighteenth-century thinking about race and performance, in spite of (and, in part, because of) its limited and compromised nature. Crucial to Jekyll’s explanation for Sancho’s theatrical failure is a supposedly “defective and incorrigible articulation,” most often read along the lines of disability. This chapter examines how vocal and linguistic performance in the eighteenth-century created and disrupted popular narratives about race.

An increasing number of studies report that different forms of rhythmic stimulation influence linguistic task performance. First, this chapter aims at describing to what extent the construction of a tree-like structure in which lower-level units are combined into higher-level constituents in linguistic syntax and rhythm could be subserved by similar mechanisms. Second, we review and categorize rhythmic stimulation findings based on the temporal delay between the rhythmic stimulation and linguistic task that it influences, the precise relationship between the rhythmic and linguistic stimuli used, and the nature of the linguistic task. Lastly, this chapter discusses which categories of rhythmic stimulation effects can be interpreted in a framework based on a shared cognitive system that is responsible for hierarchical structure building.

Music, like language, relies on listeners’ ability to extract information as it unfolds in time. One key difference between music and language is the strong rhythmic regularities of music relative to language. Despite a wealth of literature describing the rhythms of song as regular and the rhythms of speech as irregular, the acoustic features and neural processing of rhythmic regularity in song and (lack thereof) in speech are poorly understood. This chapter examines acoustic, behavioral, and neural indices of rhythmic regularity in speech and song. Our goal is to review which features induce rhythmic regularity and examine how regularity impacts attention, memory, and comprehension. This work has the potential to inform a wide range of areas, including clinical interventions for speech and reading, best practices for teaching and learning in the classroom, and how attention is captured in real-world scenarios.

Music rhythm and speech rhythm share acoustic, temporal and syntactic similarities, and neuroscience research has shown that similar areas and networks in the brain are recruited to process both types of signals. Rhythm is a core predictive element for both music and speech, allowing for facilitated processing of upcoming, predicted elements. The combined study of music and speech rhythm processing can be particularly insightful, considering the stronger regularity and predictability of musical rhythm. Although speech rhythm is less regular, it still contains regularities, notably at syllabic and prosodic levels. In this chapter, we outline different research lines investigating connections between music and speech rhythm processing, including the recently proposed processing rhythm in speech and music framework, as well as music rhythm interventions and stimulations that aim to improve speech signal processing both in the short term and the long term. Implications for developmental language disorders and future research perspectives are outlined.

The term “prosody” encompasses properties of speech that span several timescales and levels of linguistic units, from the intensity and pitch of phonemes and syllables to the overall timing and intonation of utterances and conversations. Hierarchical temporal structure was introduced as a measure of clustering in sound energy that quantifies the relationship among timescales of prosody and related aspects of speech and music. The present chapter reviews several studies showing that the degree of hierarchical temporal structure in speech signals, as measured by the rate of increase in clustering with timescale, reflects the degree of prosodic composition. Prosodic composition can serve different purposes in communication, including linguistic emphasis and chunking in infant-directed speech, scaffolding of spoken interactions with children whose speech abilities are relatively less developed, and stricter timing in formal interactions. Prosodic composition as expressed by hierarchical temporal structure may serve as a control parameter in speech production and communication.

Brain rhythms at different timescales are observed ubiquitously across cortex. Despite this ubiquitousness, individual brain areas can be characterized by "spectral profiles," which reflect distinct patterns of endogenous brain rhythms. Crucially, endogenous brain rhythms have often been explicitly or implicitly related to perceptual and cognitive functions. Regarding language, a vast amount of research investigates the role of brain rhythms for speech processing. Particularly, lower-level processes, such as speech segmentation and consecutive syllable encoding and the hemispheric lateralization of such processes, have been related to auditory cortex brain rhythms in the theta and gamma range and explained by neural oscillatory models. Other brain rhythms – particularly delta and beta – have been related to prosodic processing (delta) but also higher-level language processing, including phrasal and sentential processing. Delta and beta brain rhythms have also been related to predictions from the motor cortex, emphasizing the tight link between production and perception. More recently, neural oscillatory models were extended to include different levels of language processing.

Modern proponents of free speech maintain that the value of expression resides in its authenticity-making power, which generates political legitimacy. They simultaneously concede that the value of expression is not without abridgments, no matter how deeply felt or authentically fulfilling such expression may be. Given these commitments, how can free speech be valued for its authenticity-making power, and yet also conditionally regulated? This chapter explores a resolution based on an interpretation of Aquinas’s thought on speech and expression. First, Aquinas clarifies Aristotle’s distinction between vox (animal expression) and loquutio (logical discourse) as an irreducible relationship of explanandum and explanans: loquutio is uniquely disposed to comprehending what is just or unjust within what is pleasant or painful. Second, Thomistic loquutio is directed to truth while permitting false claims as logical-temporal constituents of discourse, requiring above all a “discursive situation” that avoids both contradiction and epistemically unjustified conviction. These characteristics of Thomistic loquutio are supported by his treatment of angelic communication, which is not revelatory so much as consultatory from a second-person perspective and clarificatory from a first-person perspective. Ultimately, this interpretive Thomistic account rejects the modern commitment of authenticity without absolutism, while affirming certain aspects of what makes speech politically valuable.