A Perceptual Investigation of Speech Rhythm Based on a Continuum of Durational Change
Abstract
Speech rhythm is a complicated prosodic feature of spoken languages. Being a suprasegmental feature, it is not a clear cut difference between tonal (Chinese) and non-tonal (English) languages. The popularization of defining languages in terms of their speech rhythms was popularized in the mid 1900’s. Terms like syllable-timed and stress-timed were coined and ever since then there has been much debate on what is a speech rhythm and why particular languages have different rhythms. While speech rhythm was initially a study based on how a listener perceived a spoken language, it became much more focused on measurements and attempts to find isochrony within the spoken signal. The departure from a search for isochrony led to the categorization of languages based on the acoustics and structural makeup of allowed phoneme clusters and the timing of how those clusters appear in spoken language. The purpose of this study is to return to the notion of rhythm perception through two perception experiments of over 100 participants (combined) that present masked audio based on Chinese and English broadcast news and comparing listeners’ impressions to those mathematical metrics that previously showed the same data to be different. There has been a notable lack of research on the perception of speech rhythm and this study shows that while mathematical measurements can capture some aspects of rhythm, there are other questions to be asked about how we hear the rhythmic patterns of spoken language.