INTER-SUBJECT AGREEMENT IN RHYTHM EVALUATION FOR FOUR LANGUAGES (ENGLISH, FRENCH, GERMAN, ITALIAN)

Paolo Mairano1 & Antonio Romano2
1Fac. di Lingue e Lett. Straniere - Univ. di Torino (Italy); 2Dip. Scienze del Linguaggio - Univ. di Torino (Italy)

ID 1110
[full paper]

This paper deals with the acoustic correlates of stress-timed and syllable-timed languages proposed by Ramus et alii (1999). An experiment has been conducted in order to verify the validity of the three correlates using data of 4 languages (and some of their varieties). The novelty of this study consists in the fact that the segmentation of the acoustic data (based on "The North Wind and the Sun" of the IPA) was carried out independently by both authors. The results show significant differences if compared between them and with those of other studies. However, the general tendency seems to confirm, at least partially, the validity of the three correlates even though they have been obtained from narrative texts.