Correlates of linguistic rhythm in the speech signal

Abstract

Spoken languages have been classified by linguists according to their rhythmic properties, and psycholinguists have relied on this classification to account for infants' capacity to discriminate languages. Although researchers have measured many speech signal properties, they have failed to identify reliable acoustic characteristics for language classes. This paper presents instrumental measurements based on a consonant/vowel segmentation for eight languages. The measurements suggest that intuitive rhythm types reflect specific phonological properties, which in turn are signaled by the acoustic/phonetic properties of speech. The data support the notion of rhythm classes and also allow the simulation of infant language discrimination, consistent with the hypothesis that newborns rely on a coarse segmentation of speech. A hypothesis is proposed regarding the role of rhythm perception in language acquisition.

Phonological development in relation to native language and literacy: Variations on a theme in six alphabetic orthographies

“…Evidence that speech perception and production mechanisms come to vary between languages from different speech rhythm categories will be explored here as an analogous instance of first linguistic skills. Syllable structure together with patterns of vowel reduction and lexical stress form the basis of several metrics of speech rhythm (Dauer, 1983;Grabe & Low, 2002;Ramus, Nespor, & Mehler, 1999), which can distinguish prototypical stress-timed languages like English, German and Dutch from syllabletimed languages like French, Italian and Spanish. The former differ from the latter in the tendency for lexical stress to be contrastive; that is, the level of emphasis given to each syllable in polysyllabic words is critical for word meaning (e.g.…”

“…Speech rhythm will be considered here as one linguistic characteristic that might create variation. The existing literature consistently distinguishes syllable-timed French and Spanish from stress-timed English (e.g., Dauer, 1983;Prieto et al, 2012;Ramus et al, 1999) and most often places European Portuguese and Greek in an intermediate category (Dauer, 1983;Frota & Vigário, 2001;Grabe & Low, 2002). Icelandic has not yet been classified, and while its Germanic origin and complex syllables suggest stresstiming, the absence of vowel reduction plus fixed lexical stress contribute to a mixed profile (Table 1).…”

José Morais, Syllables, Literature and much more

“…These results established that rhythm might serve as an initial cue to language discrimination. Ramus, Nespor, and Mehler (1999) proposed an operational definition for rhythm and used it to establish a language classification as a function of three acoustic parameters: %V, the proportion of vocalic space relative to the total length of an utterance; ΔV, the variability in the length of vocalic spaces, and ΔC, the variability in the length of consonant clusters. The formulation of this definition of linguistic rhythm did not take into consideration the syllable as such but its sub-components, the vowels and the consonant clusters that are attested.…”

Compressibility of Segment Duration in English and Chinese

“…The notable measurements are %V (the proportion of vocalic intervals in an utterance), ∆V (the standard deviation of vocalic intervals within an utterance), ∆C (the standard deviation of consonantal intervals within an utterance) from Ramus [20], VarcoC (Standard deviation of consonantal intervals divided by mean and multiplies 100), VarcoV (Standard deviation of vocalic intervals divided by mean and multiplies 100) from Dellwo [21,22], and the pairwise variability indices nPVI and rPVI (Pairwise Variability Index in their measurements on successive vocalic and intervocalic intervals) introduced by Grabe and Low [23].…”