In response to the Power (1983) - Beattie (1984) controversy, a more general critique of the construct of cognitive rhythms is presented. It is argued that the term itself is a misnomer, that the relevance of articulation rate has been neglected, that fluent and hesitant phases of cognitive rhythms have been assessed both subjectively and intuitively, that the speech-production model underlying the concept is simplistic, and that the empirical evidence is based on an extraordinarily small corpus which has been described inadequately in the research literature.
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