Rhythm type and articulatory dynamics in English, French and Japanese

Abstract

In the study reported here, movement data were analyzed for archetypes of the three most widely recognized temporal organization categories: English for stress timing, Japanese for mora timing, and French for syllable timing. Reiterant speech productions from the three languages were elicited and analyzed as commensurately as possible, using the experimental methodology employed originally by Kelso, Vatikiotis-Bateson, Saltzman & Kay [ Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (1985) 77, 266–280] for two speakers of English. The primary aim was to show the extent to which simple kinematic analysis of a primary articulator (the lower lip–jaw complex) can reveal universal and language-specific aspects of temporal organization and prosody. For the most part, kinematic results were like those of Kelso et al. (1985): most of the spatiotemporal variability of the movement behavior could be accounted for in the highly linear covariation of peak velocity and displacement. Moreover, there were clear condition-specific correlates of stress in English and French, of accent-related tone and mora complexity in Japanese, and speaking rate in all three languages on displacement and on the slope of the linear relation between peak velocity and displacement. These results are interpreted in terms of an abstract, yet simple, second-order system such as a linear spring–mass. By setting a small number of underlying parameters, such a system can characterize the overall spatiotemporal behavior of the lip–jaw system, as well as most of the specific linguistic and performance distinctions in stress, speaking rate and the like.