Language comprehension and the rhythm of perception

It is widely agreed that language understanding has a distinctive phenomenology, as illustrated by phenomenal contrast cases. Yet it remains unclear how to account for the perceptual phenomenology of language experience. I advance a rhythmic account, which explains this phenomenology in terms of changes in rhythm of sensory capacities in both reading and speech perception. After presenting conceptual and empirical foundations for the account, I argue that it should be abductively preferred over competing views, especially the semantic perceptual view, which holds that we literally perceive linguistic meaning.