The usefulness of metrics in the quantification of speech rhythm

Arvaniti, Amalia

doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2012.02.003

Cited by 218 publications

(211 citation statements)

References 61 publications

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“…In a comprehensive cross-linguistic study using several metrics, Arvaniti [27] shows, as would be hoped, a significant main effect of language, but only patchy correlations between rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org Phil. Trans.…”

Section: Coordinative Rhythm and Responses To The Lack Of Isochronymentioning

confidence: 86%

Speech rhythm: a metaphor?

Nolan

Jeon

2014

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Is speech rhythmic? In the absence of evidence for a traditional view that languages strive to coordinate either syllables or stress-feet with regular time intervals, we consider the alternative that languages exhibit contrastive rhythm subsisting merely in the alternation of stronger and weaker elements. This is initially plausible, particularly for languages with a steep 'prominence gradient', i.e. a large disparity between stronger and weaker elements; but we point out that alternation is poorly achieved even by a 'stress-timed' language such as English, and, historically, languages have conspicuously failed to adopt simple phonological remedies that would ensure alternation. Languages seem more concerned to allow 'syntagmatic contrast' between successive units and to use durational effects to support linguistic functions than to facilitate rhythm. Furthermore, some languages (e.g. Tamil, Korean) lack the lexical prominence which would most straightforwardly underpin prominence of alternation. We conclude that speech is not incontestibly rhythmic, and may even be antirhythmic. However, its linguistic structure and patterning allow the metaphorical extension of rhythm in varying degrees and in different ways depending on the language, and it is this analogical process which allows speech to be matched to external rhythms.

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Section: Coordinative Rhythm and Responses To The Lack Of Isochronymentioning

confidence: 86%

Speech rhythm: a metaphor?

Nolan

Jeon

2014

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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“…Global and local linear measures of segmental variability known as 'rhythm metrics' have been used to classify languages according to the traditional rhythm taxonomy, with very limited success (for formal and empirical critique, see especially Cummins 2002;Gibbon 2006;Arvaniti 2012). Nonetheless, in a study by Ramus et al (1999), a short text read by four Polish speakers exhibited high standard deviation of consonantal intervals (ΔC) and a low proportion of vocalic intervals (%V).…”

Section: Rhythm Typementioning

confidence: 99%

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

Malisz

Żygis

Pompino-Marschall

2013

Laboratory Phonology

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"But the increasing interest in connected, more specifically spontaneous speech data bases has made it mandatory for researchers to enter into phonetics and phonology above the word in real-life communication, and it is in this domain that glottalisation phenomena abound." (Kohler 2001: 317) Abstract: The present paper examines glottal stops and the glottalisation of word-initial vowels in Polish and German. The presence of glottal marking is studied depending on speech style ('speech' vs. 'dialogue'), prominence, phrasal position, speech rate, word type, preceding segment, and following vowel height. A question is also posed about the extent to which glottal marking might be dependent on the rhythmic structure of a given language or style. We analyzed recordings of 18 Polish and German speakers. The results point to significant differences between the two languages. In German, glottal marking occurs significantly more often (63.4%) than in Polish (45%). Whereas in both languages (and both styles) the majority of prominent vowels are more often glottally marked than non-prominent vowels, in German word-initial non-prominent syllables are also marked relatively often. Regarding phrase position, glottal marking occurs significantly more often at the phrase-initial position compared to phrase-medial position in Polish, while no such difference has been found in German. In addition, it is shown that in both languages glottal marking is strongly dependent on the tongue height of the marked vowel: low vowels are more frequently glottalised than non-low vowels. Finally, glottal marking in Polish is more likely to occur when rhythmic variability shifts towards the 'indeterminate', strengthening the hypothesis that glottal marking facilitates perceptual grouping.

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“…Such demonstration is critical because rhythm, after all, is about timing, even if it is 9th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2018 13-16 June 2018, Poznań, Poland only about perceived timing as has been argued sometimes [27]. From the very beginning, the rhythm dichotomy is about regularity of timing, whether the alleged unit is the syllable or stress interval.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Since then, a large number of studies have applied the rhythm metrics to different languages and even varieties of non-native accents [24,25,26,27,28]. On the other hand, criticisms of the rhythm metrics also followed, drawing evidence on the computations, their instability due to speech rate, speaking style, within-speaker variation and measurement uncertainty, and their failure to capture the true nature of speech rhythm [5,27,29,30,31,32].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…On the other hand, criticisms of the rhythm metrics also followed, drawing evidence on the computations, their instability due to speech rate, speaking style, within-speaker variation and measurement uncertainty, and their failure to capture the true nature of speech rhythm [5,27,29,30,31,32]. They point out that although rhythm metrics do separate languages based on syllable-timing versus stress-timing to some extent, they do not demonstrate that the perceived differences are the result of either a rhythmic intent on the part of the speaker or a cyclicity underlying the process of speech production [5].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Compressibility of Segment Duration in English and Chinese

Wang¹,

Zhang²,

Xu³

2018

Speech Prosody 2018

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This study is a reexamination of the rhythm class hypothesis through an investigation of isochrony tendency in English, an alleged stress-timed language, and Chinese, an alleged syllable-timed language. We compared the relationship between segment and syllable duration in a corpus from each language. The results show that the correlation of segment and syllable duration is close to 1 in English but much weaker in Chinese. This indicates that English segments are not compressible for the sake of equal syllable duration, while Chinese does have a weak tendency toward equal syllable duration. Combining evidence from other studies, we interpret the current finding as an indication that there is no tendency toward isochrony of stress intervals in English. In contrast, there is an isochrony tendency at both the syllable level and phrase level in Chinese. Compressibility of segments and syllables could therefore be a useful index of cross-linguistic typology of timing and rhythm.

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The usefulness of metrics in the quantification of speech rhythm

Cited by 218 publications

References 61 publications

Speech rhythm: a metaphor?

Speech rhythm: a metaphor?

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

Compressibility of Segment Duration in English and Chinese

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