15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)Barcelona, Spain |
Tradition has it that the Romance languages all share the property
of being syllable-timed. More recent work, however, has challenged
this view, emphasizing differences between languages and even between
national varieties of a language like Portuguese.
To test whether
French, Spanish, European and Brazilian Portuguese have their own prosodic
signature, we conducted a perception experiment. We used low-pass filtered
samples of carefully read, fast read, and elicited spontaneous speech
as stimuli. These were presented to subjects familiar with at least
one Romance idiom and who were asked to identify the language. We found
that recognition was best for French, irrespective of speaking style,
and second best for Spanish. Brazilian Portuguese was recognized at
above pure chance, unlike European Portuguese. In general, identification
was easier for spontaneous than for read speech. However, even for
stimuli of the same language and same style, we found differences in
recognizability depending on speaker-specific variables.
Bibliographic reference. Dufter, Andreas / Reich, Uli (2003): "Rhythmic differences within Romance: identifying French, Spanish, European and Brazilian Portuguese", In ICPhS-15, 2781-2784.