Q uantitative Characterizations of Speech Rhythm: Syllable-Timing in Singapore English

Abstract

British English and Singapore English are said to differ in rhythmic patterning. British English is commonly described as stress-timed, but Singapore English is claimed to be syllable-timed. In the present paper, we explore the acoustic nature of the suggested cross-varietal difference. In directly comparable samples from British English and Singapore English, two types of acoustic measurements were taken; we calculated a variability index reflecting changes in vowel length over utterances, and measurements reflecting vowel quality. Our findings provide acoustic data which support the hypothesized cross-varietal difference in rhythmic patterning; we show (1) that successive vowel durations are more nearly equal in Singapore English than in British English, and (2) that reduced vowels pattern more peripherally in the F1/F2 formant space in Singapore English than in British English. We complete the paper with a comparison of our vowel variability index with a set of acoustic measures for rhythm proposed by Ramus, Nespor, and Mehler (1999), which focus on variability in vocalic and intervocalic intervals. We conclude that our variability index is more successful in capturing rhythmic differences than Ramus et al. (1999)'s measures, and that an application of our index to Ramus et al.'s intervocalic measure may provide a further diagnostic of rhythmic class.

A Tool for the Quantitative Anthropology of Music: Use of the nPVI Equation to Analyze Rhythmic Variability within Long-term Historical Patterns in Music

“…the Appendix from Daniele & Patel, 2013 for an example nPVI computation). Originally developed by phoneticians to show that "stress-timed" languages (British English, German, Dutch) had naturally higher nPVI values than "syllable-timed" languages (French, Spanish, Italian), Patel and Daniele (2003a) used the nPVI to show that a composer's native language directly influences the rhythms he/she writes (Grabe & Low, 2002;Low, Grabe, & Nolan, 2000;Ramus, 2002; for recent data on vocalic nPVI in English, German, Italian, and Spanish, see Arvaniti 2012, Figure 2b). Recent studies of the nPVI have begun to explore the variation of this statistic with respect to time and culture.…”

Quantification of rhythm problems in disordered speech: a re-evaluation

“…It thus seemed likely [16] VarcoC [17] VI [21] VarcoV [17] rPVI-C [19] PVI [18] nPVI-V [19] rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org Phil. Trans.…”

The Validity and Reliability of Rhythm Measurements in Automatically Scoring the English Rhythm Proficiency of Chinese EFL Learners

“…However, it seems that they are not so uniform to differentiate the non-native languages. Low, Grabe, and Nolan (2000) found nPVI rather than rPVI could differentiate Singapore English and British English. Stockmal, Markus, and Bond (2005) reported that ΔC and rPVI may significantly distinguish the language Latvian spoken by native speakers and by Russian Latvian learners of different proficiencies while %V, ΔV and nPVI showed no significant difference among these groups.…”

“…Additionally, based on the observation that stressed and unstressed vowels in languages employing stress rhythm vary widely in duration whereas the durations of vowels in syllable rhythm languages vary less, Low, Grabe, and Nolan (2000) thus introduce Pairwise Variability Index (nPVI). Later, Grabe and Low (2002) Vol.…”