Do Rhythm Measures Reflect Perceived Rhythm?

Abstract

In a production study, Bulgarian, English and German verses with regular poetic metrical metres of different types and elicited prose utterances with varied accentual patterns are produced in textual and iterative (dada) form and measured at syllable level according to the pairwise variability index (PVI) principle. Systematic differences in PVI values show that the measure is sensitive to metrical differences. But variations for utterances with the same metrical structure and comparable measures for accentually different utterances show the measure to be insensitive to the temporal distribution of accents. A perceptual experiment with Bulgarian, English and German subjects confirms the hypothesis that the perceived strength of rhythmicity in a line of verse is determined not only by its temporal structure, but also by other acoustic properties, most clearly by F₀ change within the metrical foot.

Speech rhythm: a metaphor?

“…Barry et al [53], for instance, show that for German listeners, differences in F0 can achieve a percept of rhythmicality more effectively than durational alternation. Cumming [42], in similar vein, presents a study exploring interactions between perceived duration and F0 in judging the naturalness of speech rhythm in short samples of connected speech.…”

Phonotactic and phrasal properties of speech rhythm. Evidence from Catalan, English, and Spanish

“…13 Yet the rhythm percept of these production differences might well be categorical in nature. Thus we need to investigate in greater depth the mapping between perceptual properties of rhythm on the one hand and the acoustic properties present in speech on the other (see Barry et al, 2009 for a recent study).…”

Speech timing and linguistic rhythm: On the acoustic bases of rhythm typologies

“…These results contribute to the growing body of evidence for a rather weak, or indeed absent, relationship between rhythm metrics and the timing phenomena that they are supposed to capture (e.g. Arvaniti, 2009;Barry et al, 2009;Easterday et al, 2011;Knight, 2011). Systemic differences in the phonologies of diverse languages are not well reflected in the metrics (Easterday et al, 2011), and as we have seen in this study, nor are subtle (yet perceptible) realisational differences due to the dialect-specific implementation of the prosodic hierarchy and articulatory strategy.…”

“…Just to name a few critical outcomes of some recent studies, a given language might be placed in different classes based on the output of different metrics (Grabe and Low, 2002). The differences in metric scores induced by variation in materials, speaking styles, speech rate or speaker identity can exceed those related to rhythm class affiliation (Arvaniti, 2009;Barry, Andreeva, and Koreman, 2009;Wiget et al, 2010). Different rhythmic affiliations sometimes fail to show up in calculations of common metrics (White, Payne, and Mattys, 2009).…”