Abstract
This paper describes an experiment which attempted to determine the degree of consensus, if any, on the perception of syllable/stress-timed rhythm in seven languages–Arabic, Polish, Argentinian Spanish, Finnish, Japanese, Indonesian and Yoruba. Recorded language samples in reading and conversational styles were presented to English and French Phoneticians and English and French Non-Phoneticians. Results indicate that all groups classified Arabic as strongly stress-timed. Predictably, phoneticians showed greater discrimination than non-phoneticians. For the reading style, statistically more reliable than the conversational style, phoneticians classified Spanish as clearly stress-timed and Yoruba as syllable-timed while Japanese, Finnish and Indonesian were not clearly assigned to either rhythmic type. Opinions differed on the categorization of Polish. Even so, languages appear not to fall clearly into dichotomous rhythmic types but to display features of both types in different proportions.
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