# Limit cycles for speech

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.04642 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04642/

## Key facts

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- First posted on arXiv 4 Dec 2025.

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.