THE CONTINUUM OF SPEECH RHYTHM: COMPUTATIONAL TESTING OF SPEECH RHYTHM OF LARGE CORPORA FROM NATURAL CHINESE AND ENGLISH SPEECH.

Matthew Benton1, Liz Dockendorf1, Wenhua Jin1, Yang Liu2 & Jerold Edmondson1
1The University of Texas at Arlington; 2The University of Texas at Dallas

ID 1591
[full paper]

Past research on the dichotomy of language rhythm classes (stress- vs. syllable-timing) has typically been performed on constructed speech data, e.g. "The North Wind and the Sun" text. Our research goes beyond the previously established speech rhythm studies by combining: (1) a data set of 175 minutes of audio from large corpora of natural English and Chinese speech and (2) natural language processing techniques to compute phonetic segment-statistics. Our findings generally agree with the previous result that Chinese and English fall into distinct rhythm categories. However, when individual speaker data were considered in our analysis, an overlapping continuum across both languages was shown to exist. These results indicate that using "ideal" data to measure speech rhythm does not fully explain the division between languages.

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