SpringerLink
Log in

The Concept and Measurement of Speech Rhythm

  • Chapter
Speech Rhythm in Varieties of English

Part of the book series: Prosody, Phonology and Phonetics ((PRPHPH))

  • 760 Accesses

Abstract

This chapter discusses the nature and measurement of speech rhythm and proposes a multidimensional model of speech rhythm. Acoustic research on speech rhythm usually relies on so-called rhythm metrics, and the existing metrics are described and compared. Most rhythm metrics are based on duration and quantify, for example, the variability of vocalic durations. Greater variability is associated with stress timing and less variability with syllable timing. However, in order to fully grasp the rhythm of a language or variety, other acoustic correlates of prominence should also be taken into account to quantify the various dimensions along which speech rhythm can vary. These include variability in intensity, loudness, fundamental frequency, and the variability of sonorant and voiced durations. More generally, a syllable-timed language can be characterised as consisting of recurrent elements (such as syllables or vocalic intervals) of relatively equal prominence. Usually not all correlates of prominence contribute equally to such a syllable-timed rhythm. A language might be more syllable-timed with regard to one correlate, for example, the variability of vocalic durations, but more stress-timed with regard to another, for example, variability in intensity. It follows that speech rhythm can only be captured adequately by a multidimensional model that acknowledges the possibility of different coexisting rhythms in a language. The chapter also makes suggestions to improve methods for the quantification of speech rhythm. First of all, additional rhythm metrics are developed that are based on the variability of sonorant and obstruent intervals, based on the conclusion that the acoustic contrast between sonorants and obstruents is much more salient than the contrast between vowels and consonants. Furthermore, the chapter argues that apart from variability in intensity, variability in loudness also needs to be considered. In a next step, co-occurrence patterns of different correlates of prominence need to be taken into account. This point is illustrated by develo** a rhythm metric that quantifies the simultaneous variability of duration and loudness. Broadly speaking, two kinds of languages/varieties are conceivable. In one, prominent vowels might be long and loud at the same time, so that duration and loudness reinforce each other as correlates of prominence. In another language or variety, prominent vowels might be either long or loud, so that duration and loudness partially offset each other in prominence. The potentially reinforcing use of duration and loudness as correlates of prominence can be accounted for by devising a rhythm metric that quantifies their simultaneous variability.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
EUR 32.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or Ebook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Chapter
EUR 29.95
Price includes VAT (Germany)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
EUR 42.79
Price includes VAT (Germany)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
EUR 53.49
Price includes VAT (Germany)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free ship** worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
EUR 53.49
Price includes VAT (Germany)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free ship** worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    Barry (2007) attributed the notions of the mora and mora-timing in Japanese to Bloch (1950) and Ladefoged (1975). While Pike (1945) and Abercrombie (1967) are often credited with introducing the idea of categorically different rhythm classes, Dellwo (2010: 22–6) suggested that Lloyd James (1929, 1940) popularised the idea.

  2. 2.

    Some confusion may arise from different usages of the term ‘speech rate’. In the literature on rhythm, speech rate is usually used in the context of normalisation and is a measure of how many articulatory units (such as vocalic intervals and syllables) are realised per time unit, excluding pauses. Speech rate in this sense may also be directly useful as a measure of rhythm (see discussion in Sect. 3.4.3). However, how fast a speaker talks is also of interest in research on non-native proficiency (see, e.g. Gut 2009, Götz 2013), where a distinction is made between ‘articulation rate’ and ‘speech rate’. ‘Articulation rate’ is used in the sense of articulatory units per time unit, excluding pauses (i.e. the way speech rate is used in the rhythm literature) and ‘speech rate’ including pauses. In kee** with the terminology used in speech rhythm research, I will continue to use ‘speech rate’ in the sense of phonemes or syllables per second, excluding pauses.

  3. 3.

    Low et al. (2000) actually used the terms ‘vocalic’ and ‘intervocalic’ intervals. Other authors use the term ‘consonantal’ for the latter, which seems more intuitive and in line with the abbreviation and will be used here.

  4. 4.

    Vennemann’s (1988: 32–33) Law of Initials usually leads to results similar to the MOP.

  5. 5.

    It may be argued that there is still a difference between accepting resyllabification across word boundaries, on the one hand, and applying the MOP across word boundaries, on the other hand. Arguments for resyllabification across word boundaries usually involve onsets consisting of single consonants, and onset maximisation can involve more than one consonant at a time. For the purposes of the present study, a rule is necessary that can be applied consistently. To the best of the author’s knowledge, there is no evidence showing that onset maximisation across word boundaries cannot involve multiple consonants, so that this rule can be adopted for the present purpose. This approach seems acceptable since alternative syllabification methods will be applied in parallel and their different effects will be compared.

  6. 6.

    Notwithstanding statistical significance, values of extreme members of one class sometimes were as distant as adjacent members of different classes. This indicates that an interpretation in terms of rhythm classes might be less appealing than considering rhythmicity a gradient property, as other authors do.

  7. 7.

    These values hold for the ideal conditions of the comparison of pure tones at amplitudes between 60 and 90 dB.

  8. 8.

    For a definition of speech rhythm as arising from the alternation of prominent and less prominent units, see Barry (2007: 103).

  9. 9.

    These are the values for Low’s (1998) ‘full and reduced vowel set’, which consists of fairly average read sentences.

  10. 10.

    The content of this section was published in a different form as Fuchs (2014a).

References

  • Abercrombie, David. 1967. Elements of general phonetics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ackermann, Hermann, and Ingo Hertrich. 1994. Speech rate and rhythm in cerebellar dysarthria: An acoustic analysis of syllabic timing. Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica 46(2): 70–78.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Alcoba, Santiago, and Julio Murillo. 1998. Intonation in Spanish. In Intonation systems, ed. Daniel Hirst and Albert Di Cristo, 152–166. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Arvaniti, Amalia. 2009. Rhythm, timing and the timing of rhythm. Phonetica 66(1/2): 46–63.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Arvaniti, Amalia. 2012. The usefulness of metrics in the quantification of speech rhythm. Journal of Phonetics 40: 351–373.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Arvaniti, Amalia, Tristie Ross, and Naja Ferjan. 2008. On the reliability of rhythm metrics. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 124(4): 2495.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Barry, William. 2007. Rhythm as an L2 problem: How prosodic is it? In Non-native prosody: Phonetic description and teaching practice, ed. Jürgen Trouvain and Ulrike Gut, 97–120. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

    Google Scholar 

  • Barry, William J., Bistra Andreeva, Michella Russo, Snezhina Dimitrova, and Tanja Kostadinova. 2003. Do rhythm measures tell us anything about language type? In Proceedings of the 15th international congress of phonetic sciences (ICPhS 2003), ed. by Maria-Josep Solé Daniel Recasens and Joaquín Romero, 2693–2696. Barcelona: Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona.

    Google Scholar 

  • Beckman, Mary E. 1986. Stress and non-stress accent. Dordrecht/Riverton: Foris.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Benguerel, André Pierre. 1999. Stress-timing vs. syllable-timing vs. mora-timing. The perception of speech rhythm by native speakers of different language. Études & Travaux – Institut des Langues Vivantes et de Phonétique 3: 1–18.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bertinetto, Pier Marco, and Chiara Bertini. 2007. Towards a unified predictive model of speech rhythm. Quaderni del Laboratorio di Linguistica della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa 7: n.p.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bertinetto, Pier Marco, and Chiara Bertini. 2008. On modeling the rhythm of natural languages. In Proceedings of speech prosody 2008, Campinas, ed. Plínio A. Barbosa, Sandra Madureira, and Cesar Reis, 427–430. ISCA Archive.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bertinetto, Pier Marco, and Chiara Bertini. 2010. Towards a unified predictive model of speech rhythm. In Prosodic universals. Comparative studies in rhythmic modeling and rhythm typology, ed. Michela Russo, 43–77. Napoli: Aracne.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bloch, Bernard. 1950. Studies in colloquial Japanese IV: Phonemics. Language 26(1): 86–125.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cassandro, Mario, Pierre Collet, Denis Duarte, Antonio Galves, and Jesús Garcia. 2003. An universal linear relation among acoustic correlates of rhythm. In XXIX conference on stochastic processes and their applications, Angra dos Reis.

    Google Scholar 

  • Clark, John, Collin Yallop, and Janet Fletcher. 2007. Introduction to phonetics and phonology. Oxford: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Clements, George N. 1990. The role of the sonority cycle in core syllabification. In Papers in laboratory phonology I, ed. John Kingston and Mary E. Beckman, 283–333. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Clements, George N. 1992. The sonority cycle and syllable organization. In Phonologica 1988: Proceedings of the 6th international phonology meeting, ed. Wolfgang U. Dressler, Hans C. Luschützky, Oskar E. Pfeiffer, and John R. Rennison, 63–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cole, Jennifer, Yoonsook Mo, and Mark Hasegawa-Johnson. 2010. Signal-based and expectation-based factors in the perception of prosodic prominence. Laboratory Phonology 1(2): 425–452.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth. 1993. English speech rhythm. Form and function in everyday verbal interaction. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Crystal, David. 1995. Documenting rhythmical change. In Studies in general and English phonetics: Essays in honour of Professor J. D. O’Connor, ed. J. Windsor Lewis, 174–179. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cumming, Ruth E. 2010. The language-specific integration of pitch and duration. PhD thesis. University of Cambridge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cumming, Ruth E. 2011. Perceptually informed quantification of speech rhythm in pairwise variability indices. Phonetica 68(4): 256–277.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cummins, Fred. 2002. Speech rhythm and rhythmic taxonomy. In Proceedings of speech prosody 2002, ed. Bel Bell and Isabelle Marlien, 121–126. Aix-en-Provence: Laboratoire Parole et Langage.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cutler, Anne, and Sally Butterfield. 1992. Rhythmic cues to speech segmentation: Evidence from juncture misperception. Journal of Memory and Language 31: 218–236.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cutler, Anne, and Jaques Mehler. 1993. The periodicity bias. Journal of Phonetics 21: 103–108.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dauer, R.M. 1983. Stress-timing and syllable-timing reanalyzed. Journal of Phonetics 11: 51–62.

    Google Scholar 

  • Davis, Matthew Harold. 2000. Lexical Segmentation in Spoken Word Recognition. PhD thesis. University of London.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dellwo, Volker. 2006. Rhythm and speech rate: A variation coefficient for deltaC. In Language and language- processing proceedings of the 38th linguistics colloquium, ed. Pawel̃ Karnowski and Imre Szigeti, 231–241. Frank-furt am Main: Peter Lang.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dellwo, Volker. 2008. The role of speech rate in perceiving speech rhythm. In Proceedings of speech prosody 2008, Campanela, 375–378.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dellwo, Volker. 2010. Influences of Speech Rate on the Acoustic Correlates of Speech Rhythm. An Experimental Phonetic Study Based on Acoustic and Perceptual Evidence. PhD thesis. University of Bonn. http://hss.ulb.uni-bonn.de:90/2010/2003/2003.htm.

  • Dellwo, Volker, and Petra Wagner. 2003. Relations between language rhythm and speech rate. In Proceedings of the XVth international conference of phonetic sciences, ed. Maria-Josep Solé, Daniel Recasens i Vives, and Joaquín Romero, 471–474. Barcelona: Causal Productions.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dellwo, Volker, Ingmar Steiner, Bianca Aschenberner, Jana Dankovičová, and Petra Wagner. 2004. The BonnTempo-corpus & BonnTempo-tools: A database for the study of speech rhythm and rate. In 8th international conference on spoken language processing, Lisbon, 777–780.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dellwo, Volker, Adrian Fourcin, and Evelyn Abberton. 2007. Rhythmical classification of languages based on voice parameters. In Proceedings of ICPhS XVI, ed. Jürgen Trouvain and William J. Barry, 1129–1132. Dudweiler: Pirrot.

    Google Scholar 

  • Deterding, David. 1994. The rhythm of Singapore English. In Proceedings of the fifth Australian international conference on speech science and technology, ed. Roberto Togneri, 316–321. Perth: Uniprint.

    Google Scholar 

  • Deterding, David. 2001. The measurement of rhythm: A comparison of Singapore and British English. Journal of Phonetics 29: 217–230.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ding, Hongwei, and Rüdiger Hoffmann. 2014. A durational study of German speech rhythm by Chinese learners. In Proceedings of speech prosody 7, ed. Nick Campbell, Dafydd Gibbon, and Daniel Hirst. Dublin, 295–299.

    Google Scholar 

  • Duanmu, San. 2009. Syllable structure. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Duarte, Denise, Antonio Galves, Nancy Garcia, and Ricardo Maronna. 2001. The statistical analysis of acoustic correlates of speech rhythm. Workshop on rhythmic patterns, parameter setting & language change, Bielefeld. http://www.physik.uni-bielefeld.de/complexity/duarte.pdf.

  • Fallows, Deborah. 1981. Experimental evidence for English syllabification and syllable structure. Journal of Linguistics 17: 309–317.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fastl, Hugo, and Eberhard Zwicker. 2006. Psychoacoustics. Facts and models, 3rd edn. Berlin/Heidelberg/New York: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fuchs, Robert. 2014a. Integrating variability in loudness and duration in a multidimensional model of speech rhythm: Evidence from Indian English and British English. In Proceedings of speech prosody 7, Dublin, ed. Nick Campbell, Dafydd Gibbon, and Daniel Hirst, 290–294.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fuchs, Robert. 2014b. Towards a perceptual model of speech rhythm: Integrating the influence of f0 on perceived duration. In Proceedings of interspeech 2014, ed. Haizhou Li, Helen Meng, Bin Ma, Eng Siong Chng, and Lei **e, Singapore, 1949–1953.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fuchs, Robert. 2014c. You got the beat: Rhythm and timing. In Readings in English phonetics and phonology, ed. Rafael Monroy Casas and Inmaculada de Jesús Arboleda Guirao, 165–188. Valencia: IULMA, University of Valencia.

    Google Scholar 

  • Galves, Antonio, Jesus Garcia, Denise Duarte, and Charlotte Galves. 2002. Sonority as a basis for rhythmic class discrimination. In Proceedings of speech prosody 2002, Aix-en-Provence, 323–326.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gibbon, Dafydd, and Ulrike Gut. 2001. Measuring speech rhythm. In Proceedings of eurospeech 2001, Aalborg, 91–94.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gick, Brian. 2003. Articulatory correlates of ambisyllabicity in English glides and liquids. In Phonetic interpretation – Papers in laboratory phonology VI, ed. John Local, Richard Ogden, and Rosalind Temple, 222–236. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Giegerich, Heinz J. 1992. English phonology: An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Giegerich, Heinz J. 2007. Lexical strata in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gilbert, Annie C., Victor J. Boucher, and Boutheina Jemel. 2011. The role of rhythmic chunking in speech: Synthesis of findings and evidence from statistical learning. In Online proceedings of the 17th international congress of phonetic sciences, Hong Kong, 747–750. http://www.icphs2011.hk/ICPHS_CongressProceedings.htm.

  • Götz, Sandra. 2013. Fluency in native and nonnative speech. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Grabe, Esther, and Ee Ling Low. 2002. Durational variability in speech and the Rhythm class hypothesis. In Laboratory phonology 7, ed. Carlos Gussenhoven and Natasha Warner, 515–546. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gut, Ulrike. 2003a. Non-native speech rhythm in German. In Proceedings of the 15th international congress of phonetic sciences (ICPhS 2003), ed. Maria-Josep Solé Daniel Recasens and Joaquín Romero, 2437–2440. Barcelona: Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gut, Ulrike. 2005. Nigerian English prosody. English World-Wide 26(2): 153–177.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gut, Ulrike. 2009. Non-native speech. A corpus-based analysis of phonological and phonetic properties of L2 English and German. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gut, Ulrike, and Petra Saskia Bayerl. 2004. Measuring the reliability of manual annotations of speech corpora. In Proceedings of speech prosody 2004, 227–230. Nara: ISCA.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gut, Ulrike, Jürgen Trouvain, and William J. Barry. 2007. Bridging research on phonetic descriptions with knowledge from teaching practice – The case of prosody in non-native speech. Non-native prosody: Phonetic description and teaching practice, 3–21. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hayward, Katrina. 2000. Experimental phonetics. Harlow: Longman.

    Google Scholar 

  • He, Lei. 2012. Syllabic intensity variations as quantification of speech rhythm: Evidence from both L1 and L2. In Proceedings of the 6th international conference on speech prosody, Shanghai, 22–26 May 2012, ed. Qiuwu Ma, Hongwei Ding, and Daniel Hirst, 466–469. Shanghai: Tongji University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hillenbrand, J., L.A. Getty, M.J. Clark, and K. Wheeler. 1995. Acoustic characteristics of American English vowels. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 97.5(Pt 1): 3099–3111.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Holliman, Andrew J., Clare Wood, and Kieron Sheehy. 2010. Does speech rhythm sensitivity predict children’s reading ability 1 year later? Journal of Educational Psychology 102(2): 356–366.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jang, Tae-Yeoub. 2008. Speech rhythm metrics for automatic scoring of English speech by Korean EFL learners. Malsori Speech Sounds 66: 41–59.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jespersen, Otto. 1913[1904]. Lehrbuch der Phonetik, 2nd ed. Leipzig/Berlin: B. G. Teubner.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jong, Kenneth J. de. 2001. Rate-induced resyllabification revisited. Language and Speech 44(2): 197–216.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jong, Kenneth J. de, Byung-** Lim, and Kyoko Nagao. 2001. The perception of rate induced resyllabification in English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 109(5): 2311.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jong, Nivja H. de, and Tom Wempe. 2009. Praat script to detect syllable nuclei and measure speech rate automatically. Behavior Research Methods 41(2): 385–390.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kinoshita, Naoko, and Chris Sheppard. 2011. Validating acoustic measures of speech rhythm for second language acquisition. In Online proceedings of the 17th international congress of phonetic sciences, Hong Kong, 1686–1689.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kiparsky, Paul. 1979. Metrical structure assignment is cyclic. Linguistic Inquiry 3(3): 421–441.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kochanski, G., Esther Grabe, J. Coleman, and B. Rosner. 2005. Loudness predicts prominence: Fundamental frequency lends little. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 118: 1038–1054.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Labov, William. 1997. Resyllabification. In Variation, change and phonological theory, ed. Frans Hinskens, Roeland van Hout, and W. Leo Wetzels, 145–180. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Ladefoged, Peter. 1975. A course in phonetics. New York: Harcourt Brace Janovitch.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lehiste, Ilse. 1977. Isochrony reconsidered. Journal of Phonetics 5: 253–263.

    Google Scholar 

  • Liss, Julie M., Laurence White, Sven L. Mattys, Kaitlin Lansford, Andrew J. Lotto, Stephanie M. Spitzer, and John N. Caviness. 2009. Quantifying speech rhythm abnormalities in the dysarthrias. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research 52(5): 1334–1352.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lloyd James, Arthur. 1929. Historical introduction to French phonetics. London: ULP.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lloyd James, Arthur. 1940. Speech signals in telephony. London: Pitman & Sons.

    Google Scholar 

  • Loukina, Anastassia, Greg Kochanski, Burton Rosner, Elinor Keane, and Chilin Shih. 2011. Rhythm measures and dimensions of durational variation in speech. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 129(5): 3258–3270.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Low, Ee Ling. 1998. Prosodic Prominence in Singapore English. PhD thesis. University of Cambridge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Low, Ee Ling, Esther Grabe, and Francis Nolan. 2000. Quantitative characterization of speech rhythm: Syllable-timing in Singapore English. Language and Speech 43(4): 377–401.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mahrt, Tim, Jennifer Cole, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, and Margaret Fleck. 2012. The contribution of acoustic cues to the perception of prominence. Poster presented at the Illinois Speech Day 2012.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mairano, Paolo, and Antonio Romano. 2007. Inter-subject agreement in rhythm evaluation for four languages (English, French, German, Italian). In Proceedings of ICPhS XVI, ed. Jürgen Trouvain and William J. Barry, 1149–1152. Dudweiler: Pirrot.

    Google Scholar 

  • McGowan, Rebecca W., and Andrea G. Levitt. 2011. A comparison of rhythm in English dialects and music. Music Perception 28(3): 307–313.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Meireles, Alexsandro R., and Plínio A. Barbosa. 2008. Speech rate effects on speech rhythm. In Proceedings of speech prosody 2008, 327–330. Campinas: RG.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mesthrie, Rajend. 2008. Synopsis: The phonology of English in Africa and South and Southeast Asia. In Varieties of English. Africa, South and Southeast Asia, ed. Rajend Mesthrie, 307–319. Berlin: de Gruyter.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Miller, M. 1984. On the perception of rhythm. Journal of Phonetics 12: 75–83.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mo, Yoonsook. 2008. Acoustic cues of prosodic prominence to naive listeners of American English. Paper presented at the 34th Berkely Linguistics Society.

    Google Scholar 

  • Morgan, James L. 1996. A rhythmic bias in preverbal speech segmentation. Journal of Memory and Language 35: 666–688.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nazzi, Thierry, Josiane Bertoncini, and Jacques Mehler. 1998. Language discrimination by newborns: Towards an understanding of the role of rhythm. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 24: 756–766.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nolan, Francis, and Eva Liina Asu. 2009. The pairwise variability index and coexisting rhythms in language. Phonetica 66: 64–77.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ong, Po Keng Fiona, David Deterding, and Low Ee Ling. 2005. Rhythm in Singapore English: A comparison of Indexes. In English in Singapore: Phonetic research on a corpus, ed. David Deterding, Adam Brown, and Low Ee Ling, 74–85. Singapore: McGraw-Hill.

    Google Scholar 

  • Parker, Steve. 2011. Sonority. In The Blackwell companion to phonology vol. 1, ed. Marc van Oostendorp, Colin J. Ewen, Elizabeth Hume, and Keren Rice, 1160–1184. Chichester: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Payne, Elinor, Brechtje Post, Lluisa Astruc-Aguilera, Pilar Prieto, and Maria Del Mar Vanrell. 2009. Rhythmic modification in child directed speech. Oxford University Working Papers in Linguistics, Philology & Phonetics 12: 123–144.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pike, Kenneth Lee. 1945. The intonation of American English. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Plag, Ingo, Gero Kunter, and Mareile Schramm. 2011. Acoustic correlates of primary and secondary stress in North American English. Journal of Phonetics 39(3): 362–374.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Platt, Talbot, Heidi Weber, and Mian Lian Ho. 1984. The new Englishes. London/Melbourne: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Price, Patti Jo. 1980. Sonority and syllabicity: Acoustic correlates of perception. Haskins Laboratories Status Report 62: 161–176.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pulgram, Ernst. 1970. Syllable, word, nexus, cursus. The Hague: Mouton.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ramus, Franck, and Jacques Mehler. 1999. Language identification with suprasegmental cues: A study based on speech resynthesis. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 105(1): 512–521.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ramus, Franck, Marina Nespor, and Jacques Mehler. 1999. Correlates of linguistic rhythm in the speech signal. Cognition 73: 265–292.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ramus, Franck, Emmanuel Dupoux, and Jacques Mehler. 2003. The psychological reality of rhythm classes: Perceptual studies. In Proceedings of the 15th international congress of phonetic sciences (ICPhS 2003), ed. Daniel Recasens, Maria-Josep Solé, and Joaquín Romero, 337–342. Barcelona: Universitat Auto’noma de Barcelona.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rathcke, Tamara, and Rachel Smith. 2011. Exploring timing in accents of British English. In Online proceedings of the 17th international congress of phonetic sciences, Hong Kong, 1666–1669.

    Google Scholar 

  • Roach, Peter. 1982. On the distinction between stress-timed and syllable-timed languages. Linguistic controversies, 73–79. London: Edward Arnold.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sailaja, **ali. 1997. The role of literacy in syllable awareness among Telugu speakers. Paper presented at SALA XVIII, JNU, New Delhi.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sailaja, **ali. 2007. Writing systems and phonological awareness. In Linguistic theory and South Asian languages: Essays in honour of K. A. Jayaseelan, ed. Josef Bayer, Tanmoy Bhattacharya, and Hany M.T. Babu, 249–265. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Schiering, René. 2007. The phonological basis of linguistic rhythm: Cross-linguistic data and diachronic interpretation. Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 60: 337–359.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schwab, Sandra, and Joaquim Llisterri. 2012. The role of acoustic correlates of stress in the perception of Spanish accentual contrasts by French speakers. In Proceedings of the 6th international conference on speech prosody, vol. 1, ed. Qiuwu Ma, Hongwei Ding, and Daniel Hirst, 350–353. Shanghai: Tongji University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Selkirk, Elisabeth. 1982. The syllable. The structure of phonological representations, part II, ed. Harry van der Hulst and Norval Smith, 337–383. Dordrecht: Foris.

    Google Scholar 

  • Steiner, Ingmar. 2004. Zur Rhythmusanalyse mittels akustischer Parameter. MA thesis. Universität Bonn. http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/~steiner/pdf/MA-Arbeit.pdf.

  • Steiner, Ingmar. 2005. On the analysis of speech rhythm through acoustic parameters. In Sprachtechnologie, mobile Kommunikation und linguistische Ressourcen, ed. Bernhard Fisseni, Hans-Christian Schmitz, Bernhard Schröder, and Petra Wagner, 647–658. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stetson, Raymond Herbert. 1951. Motor phonetics, 2nd ed. Amsterdam: North-Holland.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stevens, Kenneth N. 1998. Acoustic phonetics. Cambridge: MIT.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stojanovic, Diana. 2009. Issues in the quantitative approach to speech rhythm comparisons. Working Papers in Linguistics (University of Hawai’i at Mānoa) 40(9): 1–20.

    Google Scholar 

  • Vennemann, Theo. 1988. Preference laws for syllable structure and the explanation of sound change. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wagner, Petra, and Volker Dellwo. 2004. Introducing YARD (yet another rhythm determination) and re-introducing isochrony to rhythm research. In Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2004. ISCA, 227–230.

    Google Scholar 

  • White, Laurence, and Sven L. Mattys. 2007a. Calibrating rhythm: First language and second language studies. Journal of Phonetics 35(4): 501–522.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • White, Laurence, and Sven L. Mattys. 2007b. Rhythmic typology and variation in first and second languages. Segmental and Prosodic Issues in Romance Phonology 282: 237–257.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wiget, Klaus, Laurence White, Barbara Schuppler, Izabelle Grenon, Oleysa Rauch, and Sven L. Mattys. 2010. How stable are acoustic metrics of contrastive speech rhythm? Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 127(3): 1559–1569.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zec, Draga. 1995. Sonority constraints on syllable structure. Phonology 12: 85–129.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Münster, Münster, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany

    Robert Fuchs

Authors
  1. Robert Fuchs
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Singapore

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Fuchs, R. (2016). The Concept and Measurement of Speech Rhythm. In: Speech Rhythm in Varieties of English. Prosody, Phonology and Phonetics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-47818-9_3

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-47818-9_3

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-47817-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-47818-9

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation