Rhythm in Speech and Language

Köhler, Klaus J.

doi:10.1159/000208929

Cited by 83 publications

(49 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…The point to be better investigated is probably the interplay between the rhythmic structure and the intonation tier of a language, which can also influence, although indirectly, duration patterns (see also [7][12] [13]). This could lead to improve our capability to explain and capture rhythmic regularities, as also argued in [22].…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 95%

Exploring sociolinguistic discontinuity in a minority variety of French

Kaminskaïa

2018

Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory

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Three different speaking styles and fifteen regional varieties of Italian are compared in order to evaluate if, and to what extent, inter-speaker variability and contextual variation can condition the temporal dynamics of speech. The analysis bases on %V, ∆C, ∆V, nPVI and rPVI metrics: as the samples of speech tested do not present internal variation in segmental phonology and in phonotactics, very similar values are expected for the three subsets. Interestingly, results show a certain range of variability across the three groups. The phenomenon is due, in our opinion, to factors external to rhythmic structure and related to high-level prosodic domains, which can also influence segmental duration patterns.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 95%

Exploring sociolinguistic discontinuity in a minority variety of French

Kaminskaïa

2018

Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory

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“…('We ˈ ˈregularly meet for ˌcoffee/at the ˌcafé on the ˌcorner.') with focal accent on regelmäßig and partial deaccentuation [Kohler, 2009] of ˌKaffee/Caˌfé, ˌEcke in the low-tail condition; (ii) Wir treffen uns ˈregelmäßig beim ˈKaffee/Caˌfé dort an der ˈEcke. ('We ˈregularly meet for ˈcoffee/at the ˈcafé on the ˈcorner.')…”

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The Perception of Lexical Stress in German: Effects of Segmental Duration and Vowel Quality in Different Prosodic Patterns

Köhler¹

2012

Phonetica

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Several decades of research, focusing on English, Dutch and German, have set up a hierarchy of acoustic properties for cueing lexical stress. It attributes the strongest cue to criterial-level f0 change, followed by duration, but low weight to energy and to stressed-vowel spectra. This paper re-examines the established view with new data from German. In the natural productions of the German word pair Kaffee ‘coffee’ – Café ‘locality’ (with initial vs. final stress in a North German pronunciation), vowel duration was manipulated in a complementary fashion across the two syllables in five steps, spanning the continuum from initial to final stress on each word. The two base words provided different vowel qualities as the second variable, the intervocalic fricative was varied in two values, long and short, taken from Café and Kaffee, and the generated test words were inserted in a low f0 tail and in a high f0 hat-pattern plateau, which both eliminated f0 change as a cue to lexical stress. The sentence stimuli were judged in two listening experiments by 16 listeners in each as to whether the first or the second syllable of the test word was stressed. The results show highly significant effects of vowel duration, vowel quality and fricative duration. The combined vowel-quality and fricative variable can outweigh vowel duration as a cue to lexical stress. The effect of the prosodic frame is only marginal, especially related to a rhythmic factor. The paper concludes that there is no general hierarchy with a fixed ranking of the variables traditionally adduced to signal lexical stress. Every prosodic embedding of segmental sequences defines the hierarchy afresh.

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“…This perception of regularity has proved difficult if not impossible to capture and quantify by means of purely temporal measurements leading to a widespread conclusion that rhythm in speech is a perceptual phenomenon rather than an acoustic one (e.g. Kohler, 2009;Niebuhr & Wolf, 2011). This somewhat paradoxical definition of rhythm as based in perception is not very satisfactory alone.…”

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Response to Fred Cummins: Looking for Rhythm in Speech

House¹

2012

Empirical Musicology Review

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This commentary briefly reviews three aspects of rhythm in speech. The first concerns the issues of what to measure and how measurements should relate to rhythm's communicative functions. The second relates to how tonal and durational features of speech contribute to the percept of rhythm, noting evidence that indicates such features can be tightly language-specific. The third aspect addressed is how bodily gestures integrate with and enhance the communicative functions of speech rhythm.Submitted 2012 January 6; accepted 2012 July 13. KEYWORDS: rhythm, prominence, grouping, prosody, turn-taking IN his contribution, "Looking for Rhythm in Speech," Fred Cummins begins his introduction with the observation that rhythm is notoriously difficult to define and means very different things to different people. This is perhaps one of the main reasons why rhythm in speech has proved so difficult to study and why it remains such a fascinating and challenging topic. It is also why we must restrict ourselves to covering only a few sub-topics when dealing with the concept of rhythm in speech. Cummins reviews some of the history of empirical research which has frustratingly and unsuccessfully sought to find isochrony in speech. He then moves on to argue for a more promising and fruitful, holistic approach which embraces rhythm as engaging the entire body during speech. This view of rhythm encompasses bodily gestures as well as gestures of the speech articulators and integrates rhythm into a whole-body activity. I am very sympathetic to this approach and would like here to comment on three related topics. The first concerns what to measure and why, and how these measurements should relate to the communicative functions of rhythm. The second is how tonal and durational aspects of speech contribute to the percept of rhythm. The third is how bodily gestures integrate with and enhance speech rhythm in its communicative function.Fred Cummins describes what he fittingly terms "the great isochrony safari" as the hunt for measuring and finding regular temporal intervals in speech related to syllables or stresses. Measurements of acoustic regularity are meant to capture the regularity of articulatory dynamics, but as Cummins points out, the motivation for these measurements stems from intuition or at best a perceived regularity, the structure of which seems to differ across languages. This perception of regularity has proved difficult if not impossible to capture and quantify by means of purely temporal measurements leading to a widespread conclusion that rhythm in speech is a perceptual phenomenon rather than an acoustic one (e.g. Kohler, 2009;Niebuhr & Wolf, 2011). This somewhat paradoxical definition of rhythm as based in perception is not very satisfactory alone. I feel that a more useful and constructive definition should take into account the communicative functions of rhythm. This approach concentrates more on the reasons why we have the percept of rhythmical groups in speech and how this facilitates speech processing...

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Rhythm in Speech and Language

Cited by 83 publications

References 25 publications

Exploring sociolinguistic discontinuity in a minority variety of French

Exploring sociolinguistic discontinuity in a minority variety of French

The Perception of Lexical Stress in German: Effects of Segmental Duration and Vowel Quality in Different Prosodic Patterns

Response to Fred Cummins: Looking for Rhythm in Speech

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