Limit cycles for speech

Adamantios I. Gafos; Stephan R. Kuberski

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arXiv · 2512.04642

Limit cycles for speech

Adamantios I. Gafos·Stephan R. Kuberski

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Abstract

Rhythmic fluctuations in acoustic energy and accompanying neuronal excitations in cortical oscillations are characteristic of human speech, yet whether a corresponding rhythmicity inheres in the articulatory movements that generate speech remains unclear. The received understanding of speech movements as discrete, goal-oriented actions struggles to make contact with the rhythmicity findings. In this work, we demonstrate that an unintuitive -- but no less principled than the conventional -- representation for discrete movements reveals a pervasive limit cycle organization and unlocks the recovery of previously inaccessible rhythmic structure underlying the motor activity of speech. These results help resolve a time-honored tension between the ubiquity of biological rhythmicity and discreteness in speech, the quintessential human higher function, by revealing a rhythmic organization at the most fundamental level of individual articulatory actions.

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Adamantios I. Gafos, Stephan R. Kuberski. 2025-12-04. Limit cycles for speech. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.04642

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