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Review
. 2009;66(1-2):46-63.
doi: 10.1159/000208930. Epub 2009 Apr 8.

Rhythm, timing and the timing of rhythm

Amalia Arvaniti  1
Affiliations
Review

Rhythm, timing and the timing of rhythm

Amalia Arvaniti. Phonetica. 2009.

Abstract

This article reviews the evidence for rhythmic categorization that has emerged on the basis of rhythm metrics, and argues that the metrics are unreliable predictors of rhythm which provide no more than a crude measure of timing. It is further argued that timing is distinct from rhythm and that equating them has led to circularity and a psychologically questionable conceptualization of rhythm in speech. It is thus proposed that research on rhythm be based on the same principles for all languages, something that does not apply to the widely accepted division of languages into stress- and syllable-timed. The hypothesis is advanced that these universal principles are grouping and prominence and evidence to support it is provided.

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Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
PVI scores (a), ΔV – ΔC scores (b) for the corpus of Ramus et al. [1999], as presented in Ramus [2002], and %V – ΔC scores for the same corpus (c), as presented in Ramus et al. [1999]. CA = Catalan, DU = Dutch, EN = English, FR = French, IT = Italian, JA = Japanese, PO = Polish, SP = Spanish. Reproduced from Ramus [2002] and Ramus et al. [1999], with permission.
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.
a Scatterplot and regression line for the rPVI and nPVI scores of the 18 languages tested by Grabe and Low [2002]. b Scatterplot and regression line for ΔC and %V scores of the same data. Based on the data of Grabe and Low [2002], produced with permission.
Fig. 3.
Fig. 3.
a Scatterplot of %V – ΔC scores separately for each speaker of each language in the author's study (n = 5 for each language). b, c Scatterplots of Varco and PVI scores for the same data.
Fig. 4.
Fig. 4.
a %V – ΔC scores for English, German, Italian, Korean, Greek and Spanish pooled over the entire corpus in the author's study. b, c PVI and Varco scores for the same corpus.
Fig. 5.
Fig. 5.
a %V – ΔC scores for English, German, Italian, Korean, Greek and Spanish calculated over the spontaneous speech data from the author's study. b, c PVI and Varco scores for the same corpus.
Fig. 6.
Fig. 6.
%V – ΔC scores for English, Spanish and Greek separately for each sentence subset in the author's study. E = English, G = Greek, S = Spanish.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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    1. Arvaniti A. Greek phonetics: the state of the art. J. Greek Ling. 2007;8:97–208.
    1. Baltazani, M.: Prosodic rhythm and the status of vowel reduction in Greek. 17th Int. Symp. on Theoret. and Appl. Ling., vol. 1, pp. 31–43 (Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, Thessaloniki 2007).