Acoustic comparison on syllabic rates between stress-timed and syllable-timed language speakers

Abstract

Syllabic rates (i.e., phonation rate for each syllable) of a speaker provide us with a lot of interesting information about the language in question. Especially between syllable-timed language and stress-timed language, we may expect that speakers will show a gap in syllabic rates as they have their own ways to pronounce. Syllabic rates are closely related with information density in speech communication although the Rosetta Project (2011) found a negative correlation between the two illustrating the existence of encoding strategies for each of 7 popular languages in the world. Since Korean was not on the list for the Project, this paper further investigates and compares acoustic characteristics on syllabic rates between two speakers, one of English, stress-timed language, and the other of Korean, syllable-timed language, when speaking both Korean and English. The result shows that the English speaker speaks Korean 1.39 times faster than the Korean speaker in syllabic rate. The English speaker also shows higher energy distribution in high frequency range while the Korean speaker shows a relatively even distribution in all frequency ranges. When speaking English, the Korean speaker speaks slower than the English speaker, showing not much difference in duration, pitch, and intensity between the stressed and unstressed syllables. The paper concludes that keeping a proper syllabic rate for a target language might be important in language acquisition.