["Mind &Language, EarlyView. ", "\nIt 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 the 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.\n"]