Measuring rhythm. Is it separable from speech rate?

Michela Russo (1, 2) , William John Barry (3)

1 SFL - Structures Formelles du Langage
2 UP8 - Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis
3 Saarland University [Saarbrücken]

Rhythm is no longer regarded as a language primitive but rather as an emergent property, the product of phonological structure and phonetic realisation. It is therefore measurable and continous, not discrete. Recently proposed "rhythm" measures related to the durational variability of vowels and consonantal intervals have been shown to be successful in rhythmically classifying read speech from a number of languages. This study presents a comparative rhythm analysis of spontaneous Italian and German. The rhythm measures show strong fluctuation, but the overall language effect remains significant, albeit in a direction contrary to what tradition typology predicts. Some of the factors underlying the fluctuation, in particular articulation rate, are discussed.

Mots clés: syllable-timed vs. stress-timed languages; Phonological properties and rhythm; the calculation of rhythm; standard deviation of V and C; %V; PVI-V or PVI-C; KielCorpus (IPDS) and AVIPCorpus

Domaines: Linguistique

Michela Russo, William John Barry. Measuring rhythm. Is it separable from speech rate?. In Amina Mettouchi et Gaëlle Ferré (éd.), Actes du congrès international AAI : Prosodic Interfaces, Nantes, 27–29 mars 2003, https://llacan.cnrs.fr/pers/mettouchi/ip2003/actes-ip2003.pdf, Nantes, UFR Lettres et Langage, Université de Nantes, a.a.i. (acoustique, aquisition, interprétation), pp.15-20, 2003. ⟨halshs-00117585⟩