Rhythmic Patterning in Malaysian and Singapore English

Abstract

Previous work on the rhythm of Malaysian English has been based on impressionistic observations. This paper utilizes acoustic analysis to measure the rhythmic patterns of Malaysian English. Recordings of the read speech and spontaneous speech of 10 Malaysian English speakers were analyzed and compared with recordings of an equivalent sample of Singaporean English speakers. Analysis was done using two rhythmic indexes, the PVI and VarcoV. It was found that although the rhythm of read speech of the Singaporean speakers was syllable-based as described by previous studies, the rhythm of the Malaysian speakers was even more syllable-based. Analysis of the syllables in specific utterances showed that Malaysian speakers did not reduce vowels as much as Singaporean speakers in cases of syllables in utterances. Results of the spontaneous speech confirmed the findings for the read speech; that is, the same rhythmic patterning was found which normally triggers vowel reductions.

Convergence effects in Spanish-English bilingual rhythm

“…However, even when comparing the two monolingual control groups, three of the twelve pairwise comparisons did not return significant results (one for VarcoV and two for VarcoC). Similar to our findings, Tan & Low [26] showed that Varco metrics returned fewer significant differences between varieties of English than vocalic PVI indices. These results thus underscore the importance of considering timing metrics as neither interchangeable for each other nor perhaps even correlated with one another [cf.…”

“…by means of timing metrics. Timing metrics have proven useful for documenting withinlanguage dialect variation [10,26] as well as for understanding differences between groups of bilingual and monolingual speakers of the same language [11,29].…”

An acoustic investigation of the developmental trajectory of lexical stress contrastivity in Italian

“…By way of background, the PVI was originally used to examine variability in vowel duration across successive syllables of read sentences in order to understand the rhythmic patterning of different languages (e.g., Grabe and Low, 2002;Low et al, 2000;Tan and Low, 2014 ). It is one of the so called 'rhythm metrics' that has been useful in exploring the idea that languages are either stress-timed (duration of successive syllables can be uneven) or syllable-timed (duration of successive syllables is even).…”

Vowel variations among speakers of Malaysian English

“…Undeniably, even though MalE and SgE originated from the same roots, more than five decades' worth of differing political identities and language and educational policies have created distinguishable differences between the two varieties, especially in vowel production. The first difference is that SgE tends to reduce vowels more often and more consistently than MalE (Tan & Low, 2014). Tan and Low (2014), in their study on the rhythmic patterning of MalE and SgE, found that in both read speech and natural speech, SgE speakers demonstrated a more stress-timed rhythm, with a significant difference between the full-vowel sentence sets and reduced-vowel sentence sets that were used.…”

“…The first difference is that SgE tends to reduce vowels more often and more consistently than MalE (Tan & Low, 2014). Tan and Low (2014), in their study on the rhythmic patterning of MalE and SgE, found that in both read speech and natural speech, SgE speakers demonstrated a more stress-timed rhythm, with a significant difference between the full-vowel sentence sets and reduced-vowel sentence sets that were used. MalE, on the other hand, exhibited a more syllable-timed rhythm, with no significant difference between the full-vowel and reduced-vowel sentence sets.…”