Linguistic Rhythm Research Articles

Context tree selection and linguistic rhythm retrieval from written texts

The starting point of this article is the question “How to retrieve fingerprints of rhythm in written texts?” We address this problem in the case of Brazilian and European Portuguese. These two dialects of Modern Portuguese share the same lexicon and most of the sentences they produce are superficially identical. Yet they are conjectured, on linguistic grounds, to implement different rhythms. We show that this linguistic question can be formulated as a problem of model selection in the class of variable length Markov chains. To carry on this approach, we compare texts from European and Brazilian Portuguese. These texts are previously encoded according to some basic rhythmic features of the sentences which can be automatically retrieved. This is an entirely new approach from the linguistic point of view. Our statistical contribution is the introduction of the smallest maximizer criterion which is a constant free procedure for model selection. As a by-product, this provides a solution for the problem of optimal choice of the penalty constant when using the BIC to select a variable length Markov chain. Besides proving the consistency of the smallest maximizer criterion when the sample size diverges, we also make a simulation study comparing our approach with both the standard BIC selection and the Peres–Shields order estimation. Applied to the linguistic sample constituted for our case study, the smallest maximizer criterion assigns different context-tree models to the two dialects of Portuguese. The features of the selected models are compatible with current conjectures discussed in the linguistic literature.

Linguistic rhythm guides parsing decisions in written sentence comprehension

Various recent studies attest that reading involves creating an implicit prosodic representation of the written text which may systematically affect the resolution of syntactic ambiguities in sentence comprehension. Research up to now suggests that implicit prosody itself depends on a partial syntactic analysis of the text, raising the question of whether implicit prosody contributes to the parsing process, or whether it merely interprets the syntactic analysis.The present reading experiments examine the influence of stress-based linguistic rhythm on the resolution of local lexical-syntactic ambiguities in German. Both speech production data from unprepared oral reading and eye-tracking results from silent reading demonstrate that readers favor syntactic analyses that allow for a prosodic representation in which stressed and unstressed syllables alternate rhythmically. The findings contribute evidence confirming immediate and guiding effects of linguistic rhythm on the earliest stages of syntactic parsing in reading.

Effect of linguistic background on convergence of prosodic rhythm

Speech patterns of the interlocutors become more similar to each other over the course of an interaction. These spontaneous speech adaptations, or phonetic convergence (PC), have been demonstrated for segmental features, such as vowels and voice onset times (VOT) and for suprasegmental features, such as stress. In this study, speaker adaptations to speech rhythm are examined before and after an interactive map task. Using American English and Indian English speakers, convergence was measured using the centroid of the envelope modulation spectrum (EMS + centroid, Rao & Smiljanic, 2011). This spectral measure of rhythm goes beyond considering consonantal and vocalic duration variability, as used in the traditional rhythm measures, and includes information about syllable prominence, stressed and unstressed syllable variation and distribution, and pauses and disfluencies. This research will allow us to examine whether language background has an effect on convergence of global speech properties, such as linguistic rhythm. The results of this study add to our current knowledge of features that are subject to imitation in the speech of dialogue partners.

Words and syllables in fluent speech segmentation by French-learning infants: An ERP study

In order to acquire their native language, infants must learn to identify and segment word forms in continuous speech. This word segmentation ability is thus crucial for language acquisition. Previous behavioral studies have shown that it emerges during the first year of life, and that early segmentation differs according to the language in acquisition. In particular, linguistic rhythm, which differs across classes of languages, has been found to have an early impact on segmentation abilities. For French, behavioral evidence showed that infants could use the rhythmic unit appropriate to their native language (the syllable) to segment fluent speech by 12 months of age, but failed to show whole word segmentation at that age, a surprising delay compared to the emergence of segmentation abilities in other languages. Given the implications of such findings, the present study reevaluates the issue of whole word and syllabic segmentation, using an electrophysiological method, high-density ERPs (event-related potentials), rather than a behavioral technique, and by testing French-learning 12-month-olds on bisyllabic word segmentation. The ERP data show evidence of whole word segmentation while also confirming that French-learning infants rely on syllables to segment fluent speech. They establish that segmentation and recognition of words/syllables happen within 500 ms of their onset, and raise questions regarding the interaction between syllabic segmentation and multisyllabic word recognition.

The Role of Meter in Compositional Style in 19th Century French and German Art Song

This study extends prior research on the influence of linguistic rhythm on musical rhythm to 19th century French and German art songs. Results indicate that the measurement of rhythmic variability used in prior studies, the nPVI, or normalized Pairwise Variability Index, may be of use in studying individual compositional style even when a significant correlation with spoken language characteristics is not present in the repertoire. By modifying and focusing the results of the nPVI, and studying the relationship between rhythmic variability and notated meter, it is possible to determine musically meaningful information about individual composer's rhythmic characteristics.

On the reliability of rhythm metrics.

In the past decade or so, various metrics of vocalic and consonantal variability have been used to quantify linguistic rhythm, often yielding disparate results. The reliability of several such metrics (percentage of vocalic intervals and consonantal standard deviation, pairwise variability indices, and variation coefficient) was tested using materials from stress-timed English and German, syllable-timed Spanish and Italian, Korean, an unclassified language, and Greek, which has resisted classification. The materials for each language were divided into three subsets: an uncontrolled subset of sentences excerpted from a representative author of each language, a subset exhibiting as much as possible “stress-timing” properties (complex syllable structure and extensive vocalic variability), and a subset exhibiting as much as possible “syllable-timing” properties (simple syllable structure and limited vocalic variability). The results suggest that rhythmic scores can be severely affected by the choice of materials, especially in languages such as Italian, in which it is easy to avoid or accentuate variability (e.g., by excluding or including geminates). Variation coefficient scores were the most resistant to the manipulation of materials but failed to show statistical differences across most of the languages examined. The overall results cast doubt on the reliability of metric scores as indicators of timing and linguistic rhythm.

Characteristics of the rhythmic organization of vocal babbling: Implications for an amodal linguistic rhythm

Vocal babbling involves production of rhythmic sequences of a mouth close–open alternation giving the perceptual impression of a sequence of consonant–vowel syllables. Petitto and co-workers have argued vocal babbling rhythm is the same as manual syllabic babbling rhythm, in that it has a frequency of 1 cycle per second. They also assert that adult speech and sign language display the same frequency. However, available evidence suggests that the vocal babbling frequency approximates 3 cycles per second. Both adult spoken language and sign language show higher frequencies than babbling in their respective modalities. No information is currently available on the basic rhythmic parameter of intercyclical variability in either modality. A study of reduplicative babbling by 4 infants and 4 adults producing reduplicated syllables confirms the 3 per second vocal babbling rate, as well as a faster rate in adults, and provides new information on intercyclical variability.

A comparative study on the structure of the words of songs between Spanish and Italian, for the purpose of developing a more effective instructional method of the linguistic rhythm

A comparative study on the structure of the words of songs between Spanish and Italian, for the purpose of developing a more effective instructional method of the linguistic rhythm

The phonological basis of linguistic rhythm: cross-linguistic data and diachronic interpretation

AbstractSeveral research traditions have hypothesized that rhythmic differences between mora-, syllable- and stress-timed languages are rooted in the different phonological profiles of the languages in question. In this paper, ten of the proposed prosodic, phonotactic and morphophonological parameters are tested against data from a twenty-language sample. The evidence suggests that rhythmic differences across languages are gradual rather than discrete. Linguistic rhythm should therefore be conceived as a continuum with mora- and stress-based rhythm as focal points. Since evolutionary processes on stress- and mora-related parameters are in principle independent from each other, diachrony casts doubt on holistic typologies of linguistic rhythm.

Quantifying speech rhythm deficits in dysarthria

Disturbances in speech rhythm are common in dysarthria, and deficit patterns vary among dysarthria subtypes. Attempts to quantify differences in disordered rhythm patterns have met with limited success. Here, we attempt to differentiate various forms of dysarthria using metrics designed to quantify linguistic rhythm on a stress-timed versus syllable-timed continuum. Speakers with hypokinetic, ataxic, hyperkinetic, or mixed flaccid-spastic dysarthria read sentences. Rhythm metrics were calculated for these utterances based on vocalic and consonantal interval durations. Differences among groups were discovered for %V (percentage of utterance duration comprised of vocalic intervals), VarcoV (rate-normalized standard deviation of vocalic interval durations), and nPVI-V (normalized pairwise variability index for vocalic intervals). Differences were independent of variable speaking rates among groups. All dysarthric groups produced rhythm patterns less stress-timed than the control American English speakers, with lower VarcoV and nPVI-V and higher %V. Those with flaccid-spastic dysarthria secondary to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis exhibited a syllable-timed pattern more extreme than even control Spanish speakers, indicating minimal differentiation of stressed and unstressed syllables. These results show that the various types of rhythmic disturbance accompanying dysarthria can be effectively described and distinguished within a stress-/syllable-timed continuum and relative to healthy speech.

Rhythm, Illusion and the Poetic Idea: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé

David Evans traces the evolution of rhythmic and metrical theory and practice through each of these poets in works both in verse and prose. While finding in Benoît de Cornulier's approach to verse analysis (see FS, xl (1986), 98–99) ‘little more than statistical catalogues of each poet's formal tendencies’ (p. 16), Evans's argument follows the general development of each poet's style, rather than addressing the detailed structure of individual texts. By page 28, the notion of ‘rhythm’ is still unclear: ‘Without God, the absolute value of rhythm, which guarantees the aesthetic superiority of metrical verse over prose, simply disappears’. What is the relation between ‘rhythm’ and ‘metre’? His discussion draws on and adds to Cornulier's and Jean-Louis Guilbaud's methods of classifying cesural violations. He cites cases of verb phrases and noun phrases straddling the cesura, but does not distinguish phrases interrupted by a syntactic boundary from those which are not: ‘fleurs/(?) nouvelles’ (p. 46) is a syntactic unit, while ‘la gorge( ) aime’ is interrupted by a syntactic boundary, in other words, allows the insertion of a phrase after ‘gorge’. Also reviewed are adjacent accents before and around the cesura (for instance, hideux tronc/'; dais/ d'arbres'). That these metrical violations acquire their stylistic force as exceptions to a rule of accentual alternation is assumed, but the implications are not discussed. Can the first element of a noun phrase carry a metrically significant accent? The reader is thus left in the dark about Evans's view of Cornulier's pronouncement that ‘le vers français n'est pas accentuel’, despite the fact that many of Baudelaire's manuscript corrections suggest a distinction between linguistic rhythm and a metrically ordered accent within the phrase. In tracing Baudelaire's journey from the idealization of nombre to disillusion, Evans concludes, unsurprisingly, that identical metrical structures can articulate contradictory meanings; that is, poetic meaning is a function of the relation between the semantic and the formal.

Perception of rhythmic grouping: Testing the iambic/trochaic law

This study was designed to test the iambic/trochaic law, which claims that elements contrasting in duration naturally form rhythmic groupings with final prominence, whereas elements contrasting in intensity form groupings with initial prominence. It was also designed to evaluate whether the iambic/trochaic law describes general auditory biases, or whether rhythmic grouping is speech or language specific. In two experiments, listeners were presented with sequences of alternating /ga/ syllables or square wave segments that varied in either duration or intensity and were asked to indicate whether they heard a trochaic (i.e., strong-weak) or an iambic (i.e., weak-strong) rhythmic pattern. Experiment 1 provided a validation of the iambic/trochaic law in English-speaking listeners; for both speech and nonspeech stimuli, variations in duration resulted in iambic grouping, whereas variations in intensity resulted in trochaic grouping. In Experiment 2, no significant differences were found between the rhythmic-grouping performances of English- and French-speaking listeners. The speech/ nonspeech and cross-language parallels suggest that the perception of linguistic rhythm relies largely on general auditory mechanisms. The applicability of the iambic/trochaic law to speech segmentation is discussed.

Rhythm in English clear speech

This study investigates the effect of hyperarticulated, intelligibility-enhancing clear speech on English speech rhythm. Ramus et al. [Ramus et al., ‘‘Correlates of linguistic rhythm in the speech signal,’’ Cognition 72, 265–292 (1999)] showed that temporal properties of a speech signal such as the percentage of vocalic intervals (%V) and variability of consonantal and vocalic intervals (C, V) can be related to phonological properties such as presence/absence of unstressed vowel reduction and syllable structure complexity, and are consequently quite successful at grouping languages into the traditional rhythmic classes (stress-, syllable-, and mora-timed). Here, we explore whether/how clear speech affects stress-timed characteristics of English sentences in terms of these measures. Results revealed that the proportion of vocalic intervals (%V) within sentences remained stable across speaking styles, i.e., consonants and vowels were lengthened equally in clear speech. However, variability of both vocalic and consonantal intervals (V, C) was higher in clear than in conversational speech. The increase in V and C was achieved primarily through insertion/strengthening of short vocalic and consonantal segments that were dropped or coarticulated with surrounding sounds in conversational speech, making word and syllable boundaries more salient. These results suggest that increased intelligibility of clear speech can in part be attributed to prosodic structure enhancement by means of enhanced syllable and word boundaries demarcation.

英詩教學的探索：意象運用、語言節奏、心境自顯

English poetry teaching may begin with the analysis of the essence of poetry by examining the fundamental differences among itself, prose, drama, and novel as four genres. Western literature, traditionally, approaches poetry by the method of ”form and content,” but students in Chinese culture are generally used to the method of ”language and Hsin-ching (the heart-mind).” Hsin-ching means the phenomenon of the existential state of the current situations of Hsin's activities; briefly, it indicates Hsin's activities or human experience. The poet uses his poetic inner language to manifest the substance, the static form, and the dynamic changes of his experience and then reveals, in the written language, the idiosyncratic features of his poetic creation. To explore poetry is equal to the analytical reading of the poet's idiosyncratic use of the written language, his inner language of recognition, and his Hsin-ching as the substantial experience itself. To teach a poem, basically, is to analyze its literature, its language, its Hsin-ching, and the interrelation among the previous three realms, which are, apparently, different from one another and, yet, tightly combined into one. Affected by Greek rhetoric, English poetry teaching is chiefly based on the idea of classification in distinguishing the sound and the sense, the function of words, and the figures of speech, such as denotation and connotation, image, simile, metaphor, metonymy, personification, allusion, tone, rhyme, apostrophe, symbol, allegory, paradox, overstatement, understatement, irony, and others, but these classes are too minute for the beginner to fully and quickly understand. Therefore, this thesis turns to emphasize the relation between language and Hsin-ching, to focus on three main points of the poet’s creation: the use of image, the rhythm of language, and the self-revelation of Hsin-ching, and thereby, to reorganize the traditional readings into a better knowledge as a whole. The use of image may be discussed in the following aspects: the dominant single image, the juxtaposed double images, and the serial images, which may be linked in the synthetic way, or leap from one to another in the irrational way, or remain, separately, in the form of non-fixed substance. The self-revelation of Hsin-ching means that the poet may, consciously or unconsciously, manifest, in different degrees, his self through the poems, which may be radically lyrical, or simply narrative, or objectively representative, or merely self-concealing-in fact, he may either strongly expose or carefully conceal himself. In any case, the language of a poem reflects the poet's Hsin-ching with varying degrees, and this reflection can be traced in the linguistic rhythm of the poem. A few poems are selected here as examples for analysis, and the proposed method is applied to them so that a useful way of solution may be found to solve the common difficulties that are often faced by the student beginners with Chinese cultural background.

Turn exchange rhythm in English dialogues

This study looked at the relationship between rhythm and exchange type in British English, a stress-timed language, and Singaporean English, a syllable-timed language, using a spontaneous speech corpus. Exchange intervals (EIs), or the time difference between the end of one speaker and the beginning of another, were measured and exchanges of different types were labeled. Results showed that, in a dialogue, EIs were generally limited to a narrow range. However, within this range, EIs had at least four functions. First, EIs were reflective of the cognitive load and functioned as a way to differentiate various exchange types. Those requiring more cognitive resources, such as question-and-answer pairs, generally needed longer EIs than those not as cognitively loaded, such as backchanneling pairs. Second, EIs were indicative of linguistic rhythm. Singaporean English tended to have shorter EIs than British English. Third, EIs were reflective of politeness. The degree of politeness correlated negatively with EI. Shorter EIs showed a higher degree of respect. Finally, EIs were also indicative of the level of insecurity of a speaker, which was best reflected by gender differences. Females in general had longer EIs than males.

Can Japanese listeners recognize phonemes as well as morae as word boundary cues?

According to Shortlist (Norris et al., 1995), one of the most recent universal models in spoken word recognition, metrical segmentation strategy, provides us with important cues on word boundaries, which are determined by linguistic rhythm. If this model is applied to Japanese, the cue must be morae because it is a mora-timed language. One thing which is not fully understood yet is whether or not a phoneme boundary exists in Japanese. According to Shortlist, a possible word costraint (PWC) predicts that impossible words are inhibited, so that a phoneme boundary should not exist in Japanese. In order to test this hypothesis, two experiments were conducted using a modified version of word spotting task (search ase and hamu in nip♯ase and ri♯hamu) with three groups of Japanese subjects, 19 adults, 35 children, with or without Roman alphabet. The miss rates show that the subject groups could successfully find embedded words beyond both phoneme (adults:15%; children with alphabetic knowledge: 17%; children without it; 23%) and mora (adults:7%; children with alphabetic knowledge 9%; children without it; 13%) boundaries with high accuracy, suggesting that in fact Japanese could be sensitive to phoneme boundaries, but the PWC inhibits them because they are not possible words.

Rhythm in language and music: parallels and differences.

Rhythm is widely acknowledged to be an important feature of both speech and music, yet there is little empirical work comparing rhythmic organization in the two domains. One approach to the empirical comparison of rhythm in language and music is to break rhythm down into subcomponents and compare each component across domains. This approach reveals empirical evidence that rhythmic grouping is an area of overlap between language and music, but no empirical support for the long-held notion that language has periodic structure comparable to that of music. Focusing on the statistical patterning of event duration, new evidence suggests that the linguistic rhythm of a culture leaves an imprint on its musical rhythm. The latter finding suggests that one effective strategy for comparing rhythm in language and music is to determine if differences in linguistic rhythm between cultures are reflected in differences in musical rhythm.

Perception and acquisition of linguistic rhythm by infants

In the present paper, we address the issue of the emergence in infancy of speech segmentation procedures that were found to be specific to rhythmic classes of languages in adulthood. These metrical procedures, which segment fluent speech into its constitutive word sequence, are crucial for the acquisition by infants of the words of their native language. We first present a prosodic bootstrapping proposal according to which the acquisition of these metrical segmentation procedures would be based on an early sensitivity to rhythm (and rhythmic classes). We then review several series of experiments that have studied infants’ ability to discriminate languages between birth and 5 months, in an attempt to specify their sensitivity to rhythm and the implication of rhythm perception in the acquisition of these segmentation procedures. The results presented here establish infants’ sensitivity to rhythmic classes (from birth onwards). They further show an evolution of infants’ language discriminations between birth and 5 months which, though not inconsistent with our proposal, nevertheless call for more studies on the possible implication of rhythm in the acquisition of the metrical segmentation procedures.

Correlates of linguistic rhythm in the speech signal

Spoken languages have been classified by linguists according to their rhythmic properties, and psycholinguists have relied on this classification to account for infants’ capacity to discriminate languages. Although researchers have measured many speech signal properties, they have failed to identify reliable acoustic characteristics for language classes. This paper presents instrumental measurements based on a consonant/vowel segmentation for eight languages. The measurements suggest that intuitive rhythm types reflect specific phonological properties, which in turn are signaled by the acoustic/phonetic properties of speech. The data support the notion of rhythm classes and also allow the simulation of infant language discrimination, consistent with the hypothesis that newborns rely on a coarse segmentation of speech. A hypothesis is proposed regarding the role of rhythm perception in language acquisition.

A Cross- Linguistic Study in Learning Prosodic Rhythms: Rules, Constraints, and Similarity

Differences in the learnability of linguistic patterns may be crucial in deciding among alternative learning models. This paper compares the ability of English speakers (Experiment1) and Portuguese speakers (Experiment 2) to learn two complex rhythm patterns observed in languages with primary word stress. Subjects were familiarized with one of two rhythms during a discrimination task, followed by a recognition task which tested whether knowledge of the rhythm generalized to novel stimuli. The main findings were: (1) speakers trained on the cross-linguisticallyless common rhythm distinguished between novel stimuli which did or didnot conform to their training rhythm, while speakers trained on the more common rhythm did not;(2) English speakers were biased more strongly than Portuguese speakers against final stress; and (3) melodies that are on a boundary between rhythm categories were treated as less prototypical than other members of the same rhythm category. The results demonstrate that knowledge of complex linguistic rhythms can be generalized after very little training, and that the less common rhythm is easier to learn even though it seems more complex. The results are compared with general-purpose exemplar-based learning models as well as abstract linguistic theories of word stress acquisition.