Acoustic correlates of spanish speech rhythms

Abstract

This paper describes a study of the acoustic correlates of speech rhythms of Hispanic Bilinguals living in California and Mexican Monolinguals living in Mexico City in order to study the effect of bilingualism on language, especially on rhythm classes, and the reliability of acoustic correlates in distinguishing these classes. This study addresses stress-timing versus syllable-timing as described in Pike's pioneering work (1945). Ten monolingual speakers from Mexico and ten bilingual Spanish–English speakers born and raised in California to Mexican parents were recorded speaking spontaneously. Fifty vowel durations per speaker were collected from phrases in these recordings and explored statistically and graphically with R.2.12.2 (R Development Core Team, 2011) in order to determine the reliability of various acoustical correlates of language rhythms in differentiating speech rhythms between varieties of Spanish. Specifically the Pairwise Variability Index, introduced by Low and Grabe (1995), and interval measures, such as the standard deviation and normalized standard deviation of vowel durations, were explored. The effects of word frequencies, as determined by relevant files from the Corpus del Espa'ol (Davies, 2002), were also considered in the analysis of the data. [Work supported by a grant for the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States (UC Mexus).]