Investigating randomness in foot timing patterns in English

Abstract

Isochrony has been considered only in terms of stressed syllables. However, it may also be a random property of unstressed syllables, and a control experiment was deemed necessary. A hand‐transcribed database of 98 sentences, each produced by three speakers, formed the input to an algorithm calculating durations of feet, number of syllables per foot, and mean syllable duration within each foot. In each output dataset, feet were based on one of the following: stressed, tense, unreduced, random, or arbitrary syllables (the latter based on ordinal numbers of syllables within the utterance). Calculations were made of the correlations between foot duration and number of syllables per foot, and between foot duration and mean syllable duration. The first correlation was significant for all foot types; the second was significant (and negative) for all except the random and arbitrary types. The conclusion was that, although the mechanism of the tendency toward isochrony had by no means been discovered, it had been shown that the tendency was nonrandom and was due to linguistic rather than arbitrary factors.