Low and High, Short and Long by Crook or by Hook?

Proceedings of the 27th Annual Boston …, 2003

The coexistence of a set of these properties in a given language may promote the perception of stressed syllables in relation to other syllables - yielding stress-timing -, or make all syllables equally salient - yielding syllable-timing. Recently, the properties behind the rhythmic ...

Previous crosslinguistic studies by the authors have shown that a small number of phonemes per syllable is associated with a high number of syllables per word and per clause, and, moreover, with Object-Verb (OV) order and agglutinative morphology. And since OV order is often connected with a tendency to postpositions (e.g. Greenberg 1966) and agglutinative morphology with both a tendency to postpositions and a tendency to a higher number of cases, the present study investigates the assumption of crosslinguistic correlations between these two tendencies and between them and our "metric" variables mean size of syllables in terms of phonemes and mean size of clauses in terms of syllables.

2019

This thesis is mainly concerned with rhythm typology, that is to say with the categorisation of languages into rhythm classes. Studies in this field go back to Pike (1945) and Abercrombie (1967), who introduced the dichotomy of stress-timed vs. syllable-timed languages (the former supposedly exhibiting isochrony at the foot level, the latter at syllable level). After several experiments disproved these claims, it was proposed (cf. Bertinetto, 1981, and Dauer 1983) that the perceptual impression of stress-timing and syllable-timing could depend on structural properties of the languages, namely the presence/absence of complex consonantal clusters and vowel reduction. More recently, some authors proposed acoustic correlates of these properties (cf. Ramus, Nespor & Mehler, 1999, Grabe & Low, 2002, etc.), based on durational measures of C and V sequences. The research presented in this thesis is collocated within this framework. A number of experiments are presented, mostly exploiting a ...

Folia Linguistica 38, 3-4, 277-296, 2004

Abstract This paper reviews the evidence for rhythmic categorization that has emerged on the basis of rhythm metrics, and argues that the metrics are unreliable predictors of rhythm which provide no more than a crude measure of timing. It is further argued that timing is distinct from rhythm and that equating them has led to circularity and a psychologically questionable conceptualization of rhythm in speech.

1991

This study examines some aspects of speech rhythm, with particular reference to Swedish. A background to the problem area is given and some fundamental problems pointed out. Some theoretical issues are also studied. The question of how to describe and model interstress interval duration is addressed. It is shown, using published data from five languages, that interstress interval duration can be described as a linear function of the number of syllables. Languages seem to fall into two classes, however. It is suggested that this is due to differences in the duration of stressed syllables. It is also shown that a linear growth in interstress interval duration, as a function of the number of syllables in the interval, does not preclude the existence of interval-internal temporal compensations. Speech rhythm in Swedish is studied experimentally in both production and perception. In the production study, the hypothesis that interstress interval duration may be described as a linear function is tested on a recorded material consisting of 5 sentences read by 30 speakers. An analysis of the results gives supportfor the hypothesis. The possible existence of compression of syllables, as a function of interval length, is also studied, but no significant effect is found. The perception part of the study describes two sets of experiments. In one type of experiment the locations of stress beats in a phrase of read poetry are studied. Stress beats are found to be closely associated with the onsets of the stressed vowels. Duration perception of interstress intervals is also studied in a series of experiments, in which stimuli and experimental conditions are varied. Duration perception is shown to be quite accurate, indicating that subjects are capable of determining that interstress intervals are of unequal durations in speech.

Data from a total of 24 speakers reading 720 utterances from Catalan, English, and Spanish show that differences in rhythm metrics emerge even when syllable structure and vowel reduction are controlled for in the experimental materials, strongly suggesting that important differences in timing exist in these languages, and thus that the rhythmic percept is not solely dependent on these two phonological properties in a given language. Further analyses of the data indicate that the rhythmic class distinctions under consideration finely correlate with differences in the way languages instantiate two prosodic timing processes, namely durational marking of prosodic heads and prosodic edges. A prosody-based hypothesis is proposed regarding the importance of these durational patterns across languages for the perception of rhythmic contrasts.

PLM Yearbook, 2014

The point of departure for the following study is Patel and Daniele (2003), who suggested that the rhythm of a culture’s language is reflected in its instrumental music. The former study used the normalised pairwise variability index (henceforth nPVI), a measure of temporal patterning in speech, to compare the variability of vocalic duration in recorded speech samples with the variability of note duration in music notation on the example of English and French speech and classical music. The aim of this experiment is to test whether the linguistic rhythm conventionalised in the language of a community affects the rhythm in the musical practice of that community, by focusing on English and Polish speech and classical, as well as folk music. The nPVI values were obtained from a set of English and Polish recorded news-like sentences, and from musical notation of English and Polish classical and folk musical themes. The results suggest that reflections of Polish speech rhythm may be more apparent in folk music than in classical music, though more data are needed to test this idea. This initial study suggests that the method used might bring more fruitful results when comparing speech rhythm with less formalized and more traditional musical themes.

2011

The relationship between the %V, ΔC, and ΔV metrics of rhythm and the phonological characteristics they are generally believed to relate to is directly investigated. A cross-linguistically diverse sample of languages is examined to determine whether languages which pattern similarly according to phonological features, including range of allowable syllable structure, presence of phonemic vowel length contrast, and presence of vowel reduction, necessarily pattern similarly in their measured %V, ΔC, and ΔV values. Of these features, syllable structure is found to have a significant effect on the indices ΔC and %V and vowel length contrast is found to have a significant effect on the variability index ΔV. Vowel reduction has no significant effect on the metrics.