Analyzing rhythmic convergence between two Swiss German dialects

Abstract

With respect to existing evidence of rhythmic adjustments in response to the interlocutor’s idyosincratic characteristics, in the present study, we test whether interlocutors are likely to mutually adapt their rhythmic characteristics over the course of a conversation or after increased exposure to a dialogue partner. To study rhythmic accommodation, we used a corpus of read speech recorded by 18 speakers of two Swiss German dialects—Grison and Zurich German—before and after performing diapix tasks. The two dialects present crucial differences in the durational characteristics of intervocalic sonorants, vowel in open syllable and vowel in final position, thus creating different rhythm in these two dialects. To determine whether Grison and Zurich German speakers produce the rhythmic contrasts more similarly after the diapix tasks, we measured the Euclidean distance within a pair (ddpair) and within an individual (ddspeak) in three ratio measures devised to capture the durational differences between the two dialects. Preliminary results on ddpair have shown that certain durational contrasts are produced more similarly by certain pairs but more differently by other ones. Ratio measure related to the timing properties of vowels in final position does not change drastically before and after the interaction.