Rhythmic constraints on English stress timing

Abstract

The evidence for isochrony of stress timing is weak at best for ordinary prose, but this does not mean that the timing of stresses is always unaffected by global constraints. We asked subjects to continually repeat the phrase Take a pack of cards and to temporally align the words take and cards with an auditorily presented stimulus consisting of just the words take and cards repeated several times. The phase of the cards stimulus relative to a reference cycle defined by the take-take interval was varied over the range 0.3-0.65 in eight equal-sized phase steps. The distribution of actually produced phases for the vowel onset of the syllable cards, however, was strongly trimodal. Subjects showed a powerful preference for phases close to 0.5, and somewhat weaker preferences for phases near 0.36 and 0.6. These values are close to (although systematically different from) 0.33 and 0.66 predicted by a simple harmonic model for stress timing. The observed distribution had this form whether the subjects were speaking along with the stimulus, or trying to maintain the prescribed timing after cessation of the stimulus. Furthermore, the observed phase was influenced by the phase produced on previous trials, suggesting dynamic control with hysteresis between competing stable patterns of timing. These results demonstrate strong rhythmic constraints on the timing of stresses within a phrase, where the domain of 'phrase' in this artificial speaking task is simply the repeated text. The rhythmic constraints are similar to those observed for limb movements. Modeling these constraints should provide insight into the form of a general dynamic control regime for global speech timing, and may allow improved characterization of 'natural' timing patterns in English speech.

Analyzing geospatial variation in articulation rate using crowdsourced speech data

“…Both Allen (1972) and Morton et al (1976) found that the perceived beat of a syllable was located near the onset of voicing of the vowel in the stressed syllable. However, perception of the beat is pushed earlier as a function of the length of the preceding onset consonant cluster (the longer the cluster, the earlier the percept of the beat), and later as a function of the length of the syllable coda (Cummins & Port, 1998). The measure applied here-the temporal distance between the vowel onsets in disyllabic words-we call durVonVon (cf.…”

Rhythmic structure effects on glottalisation: A study of different speech styles in Polish and German

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Limb versus Speech Motor Control: A Conceptual Review

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