Experiments on Speech Rhythm

Abstract

In many studies involving the rhythm of English speech, the onset of the nuclear vowel of a stressed syllable has been in some way identified with the rhythmic beat of that syllable. In our experiments, however, we have found that the relation between vowel onset (VO) and syllable beat depends upon the consonants that immediately precede the stressed syllable, upon the nuclear vowel itself, upon the number of syllables between successive stressed syllables, and upon tempo. In one experiment subjects repeated the sentence “This is the beat in—,” in such a way that the stressed syllables in “This,” “beat,” and the word in the blank coincided with three successive, equally spaced clicks that they heard through headphones. For each subject, the VO of the syllables with initial /p/, /t/, or /k/ were later (relative to the click) than the VO of those with initial /b/, /d/, or /g/; onsets of the nuclear vowel /i/ were later than those of /a/; and syllables preceded by an extra unstressed syllable were later than those that were not. Large changes in tempo altered these relationships significantly.