15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15) Barcelona, Spain August 3-9, 2003

Do Rhythm Measures Tell Us Anything about Language Type?

William J. Barry (1), Bistra Andreeva (1), M. Russo (2), S. Dimitrova (3), T. Kostadinova (3)

(1) Saarland University, Germany
(2) University of Paris 8, France
(3) Sofia University, Bulgaria

Recent instrumental approaches to measuring rhythm that have been applied with a view to capturing traditional rhythm typology differences are examined. The plausibility of their language classification results and the rationale behind the measures are discussed. A new, modified measure is suggested. The effects of language, different speaker groups, material and different speaking style - in particular tempo - on the various measures is examined on the basis of extensive corpora.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Barry, William J. / Andreeva, Bistra / Russo, M. / Dimitrova, S. / Kostadinova, T. (2003): "Do rhythm measures tell us anything about language type?", In ICPhS-15, 2693-2696.