Isochrony

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Isochrony is a linguistic analysis or hypothesis assuming that any spoken language's utterances are divisible into equal rhythmic portions of some kind. Under this assumption, languages are proposed to broadly fall into one of two categories based on rhythm or timing: syllable-timed or stress-timed languages [1] (or, in some analyses, a third category: mora-timed languages). [2] However, empirical studies have been unable to directly or fully support the hypothesis, so the concept remains controversial in linguistics. [3] [1] [4]

Contents

History

Rhythm is an aspect of prosody, others being intonation, stress, and tempo of speech. [5] Isochrony refers to rhythmic division of time into equal portions by a language. The idea of was first expressed thus by Kenneth L. Pike in 1945, [6] though the concept of language naturally occurring in chronologically and rhythmically equal measures is found at least as early as 1775 (in Prosodia Rationalis ). Soames (1889) attributed the idea to Curwen. [7] This has implications for linguistic typology: D. Abercrombie claimed "As far as is known, every language in the world is spoken with one kind of rhythm or with the other ... French, Telugu and Yoruba ... are syllable-timed languages, ... English, Russian and Arabic ... are stress-timed languages." [8]

While many linguists find the idea of different rhythm types appealing, empirical studies have not been able to find acoustic correlates of the postulated types, calling into question the validity of these types. [3] [9] [10] [11] However, when viewed as a matter of degree, relative differences in the variability of syllable duration across languages have been found. [12]

Alternative division of time

Three alternative ways in which a language can divide time are postulated: [13]

  1. The duration of every syllable is equal (syllable-timed);
  2. The duration of every mora is equal (mora-timed).
  3. The interval between two stressed syllables is equal (stress-timed).

Syllable timing

In a syllable-timed language, every syllable is perceived as taking up roughly the same amount of time, though the absolute length of time depends on the prosody. Syllable-timed languages tend to give syllables approximately equal prominence and generally lack reduced vowels.

French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Brazilian Portuguese, Icelandic, Singlish, [14] [15] [16] Cantonese, Mandarin Chinese, [17] Armenian, [18] Turkish and Korean [19] are commonly quoted as examples of syllable-timed languages. This type of rhythm was originally metaphorically referred to as "machine-gun rhythm" because each underlying rhythmical unit is of the same duration, similar to the transient bullet noise of a machine gun. [20]

Since the 1950s, speech scientists have tried to show the existence of equal syllable durations in the acoustic speech signal without success. More recent research claims that the duration of consonantal and vocalic intervals is responsible for syllable-timed perception. [21]

Mora timing

Some languages like Japanese, [22] Gilbertese, Slovak and Ganda also have regular pacing but are mora-timed, rather than syllable-timed.[ citation needed ] In Japanese, a V or CV syllable takes up one timing unit. Japanese does not have diphthongs but double vowels, so CVV takes roughly twice the time as CV. A final /N/ also takes roughly as much time as a CV syllable, as does the extra length of a geminate consonant. [23]

Ancient Greek [24] and Vedic Sanskrit [25] were also strictly mora-timed. Classical Persian was also mora-timed, [26] though most modern dialects are not. Mora-timing is still common when reciting classical Persian poetry and music. [27]

Stress timing

An American English speaker narrating this section. Listen for his stress timing.

In a stress-timed language, syllables may last different amounts of time, but there is perceived to be a fairly constant amount of time (on average) between consecutive stressed syllables. Consequently, unstressed syllables between stressed syllables tend to be compressed to fit into the time interval: if two stressed syllables are separated by a single unstressed syllable, as in delicious tea, the unstressed syllable will be relatively long, while if a larger number of unstressed syllables intervenes, as in tolerable tea, the unstressed syllables will be shorter. [28]

Stress-timing is sometimes called Morse-code rhythm, but any resemblance between the two is only superficial. Stress-timing is strongly related to vowel reduction processes. [29] [30] English, Thai, Lao, German, Russian, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Faroese, Dutch, European Portuguese, [31] [32] and Iranian Persian are typical stress-timed languages. [33] Some stress-timed languages retain unreduced vowels. [34] [ page needed ]

Degrees of durational variability

Despite the relative simplicity of the classifications above, in the real world languages do not fit quite so easily into such precise categories. Languages exhibit degrees of durational variability both in relation to other languages and to other standards of the same language. [35]

There can be varying degrees of stress-timing within the various standards of a language. Some southern dialects of Italian, a syllable-timed language, are effectively stress-timed. [36] English, a stress-timed language, has become so widespread that some standards tend to be more syllable-timed than the British or North American standards, an effect which comes from the influence of other languages spoken in the relevant region. Indian English, for example, tends toward syllable-timing. [37] This does not necessarily mean the language standard itself is to be classified as syllable-timed, of course, but rather that this feature is more pronounced. A subtle example is that to a native English speaker, for example, some accents from Wales may sound more syllable-timed.

A better-documented case of these varying degrees of stress-timing in a language comes from Portuguese. European Portuguese is more stress-timed than the Brazilian standard. The latter has mixed characteristics [38] and varies according to speech rate, sex and dialect. At fast speech rates, Brazilian Portuguese is more stress-timed, while in slow speech rates, it can be more syllable-timed. The accents of rural, southern Rio Grande do Sul and the Northeast (especially Bahia) are considered to sound more syllable-timed than the others, while the southeastern dialects such as the mineiro , in central Minas Gerais, the paulistano, of the northern coast and eastern regions of São Paulo, and the fluminense, along Rio de Janeiro, Espírito Santo and eastern Minas Gerais as well the Federal District, are most frequently essentially stress-timed. Also, male speakers of Brazilian Portuguese speak faster than female speakers and speak in a more stress-timed manner. [39]

Linguist Peter Ladefoged has proposed (citing work by Grabe and Low [40] ) that, since languages differ from each other in terms of the amount of difference between the durations of vowels in adjacent syllables, it is possible to calculate a Pairwise Variability Index (PVI) from measured vowel durations to quantify the differences. The data show that, for example, Dutch (traditionally classed as a stress-timed language) exhibits a higher PVI than Spanish (traditionally a syllable-timed language). [12]

The stress-timing–syllable-timing distinction as a continuum

Given the lack of solid evidence for a clear-cut categorical distinction between the two rhythmical types, it seems reasonable to suggest instead that all languages (and all their accents) display both types of rhythm to a greater or lesser extent. T. F. Mitchell claimed that there is no language which is totally syllable-timed or totally stress-timed; rather, all languages display both sorts of timing. Languages will, however, differ in which type of timing predominates. [41] This view was developed by Dauer [42] [43] in such a way that a metric was provided allowing researchers to place any language on a scale from maximally stress-timed to maximally syllable-timed. Examples of this approach in use are Dimitrova's study of Bulgarian [44] and Olivo's study of the rhythm of Ashanti Twi. [45]

According to Dafydd Gibbon and Briony Williams, Welsh is neither syllable-timed nor stress-timed, as syllable length varies less than in stress-timed languages. [46]

See also

Related Research Articles

A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (length). They are usually voiced and are closely involved in prosodic variation such as tone, intonation and stress.

A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds, typically made up of a syllable nucleus with optional initial and final margins. Syllables are often considered the phonological "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic metre and its stress patterns. Speech can usually be divided up into a whole number of syllables: for example, the word ignite is made of two syllables: ig and nite.

In linguistics, and particularly phonology, stress or accent is the relative emphasis or prominence given to a certain syllable in a word or to a certain word in a phrase or sentence. That emphasis is typically caused by such properties as increased loudness and vowel length, full articulation of the vowel, and changes in tone. The terms stress and accent are often used synonymously in that context but are sometimes distinguished. For example, when emphasis is produced through pitch alone, it is called pitch accent, and when produced through length alone, it is called quantitative accent. When caused by a combination of various intensified properties, it is called stress accent or dynamic accent; English uses what is called variable stress accent.

English phonology is the system of speech sounds used in spoken English. Like many other languages, English has wide variation in pronunciation, both historically and from dialect to dialect. In general, however, the regional dialects of English share a largely similar phonological system. Among other things, most dialects have vowel reduction in unstressed syllables and a complex set of phonological features that distinguish fortis and lenis consonants.

In the phonology of the Romanian language, the phoneme inventory consists of seven vowels, two or four semivowels, and twenty consonants. In addition, as with other languages, other phonemes can occur occasionally in interjections or recent borrowings.

Stress is a prominent feature of the English language, both at the level of the word (lexical stress) and at the level of the phrase or sentence (prosodic stress). Absence of stress on a syllable, or on a word in some cases, is frequently associated in English with vowel reduction – many such syllables are pronounced with a centralized vowel (schwa) or with certain other vowels that are described as being "reduced". Various contradictory phonological analyses exist for these phenomena.

In linguistics, prosody is the study of elements of speech that are not individual phonetic segments but which are properties of syllables and larger units of speech, including linguistic functions such as intonation, stress, and rhythm. Such elements are known as suprasegmentals.

Auditory phonetics is the branch of phonetics concerned with the hearing of speech sounds and with speech perception. It thus entails the study of the relationships between speech stimuli and a listener's responses to such stimuli as mediated by mechanisms of the peripheral and central auditory systems, including certain areas of the brain. It is said to compose one of the three main branches of phonetics along with acoustic and articulatory phonetics, though with overlapping methods and questions.

In linguistics, a chroneme is a basic, theoretical unit of sound that can distinguish words by duration only of a vowel or consonant. The noun chroneme is derived from Ancient Greek χρόνος (khrónos) 'time', and the suffixed -eme, which is analogous to the -eme in phoneme or morpheme. However, the term does not have wide currency and may be unknown even to phonologists who work on languages claimed to have chronemes.

In phonetics, vowel reduction is any of various changes in the acoustic quality of vowels as a result of changes in stress, sonority, duration, loudness, articulation, or position in the word, and which are perceived as "weakening". It most often makes the vowels shorter as well.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Segment (linguistics)</span> Distinct unit of speech

In linguistics, a segment is "any discrete unit that can be identified, either physically or auditorily, in the stream of speech". The term is most used in phonetics and phonology to refer to the smallest elements in a language, and this usage can be synonymous with the term phone.

In linguistics, intonation is the variation in pitch used to indicate the speaker's attitudes and emotions, to highlight or focus an expression, to signal the illocutionary act performed by a sentence, or to regulate the flow of discourse. For example, the English question "Does Maria speak Spanish or French?" is interpreted as a yes-or-no question when it is uttered with a single rising intonation contour, but is interpreted as an alternative question when uttered with a rising contour on "Spanish" and a falling contour on "French". Although intonation is primarily a matter of pitch variation, its effects almost always work hand-in-hand with other prosodic features. Intonation is distinct from tone, the phenomenon where pitch is used to distinguish words or to mark grammatical features.

Secondary stress is the weaker of two degrees of stress in the pronunciation of a word, the stronger degree of stress being called primary. The International Phonetic Alphabet symbol for secondary stress is a short vertical line preceding and at the foot of the secondarily stressed syllable, as before the nun in proˌnunciˈation. Another tradition in English is to assign acute and grave accents for primary and secondary stress, respectively: pronùnciátion.

Metrical phonology is a theory of stress or linguistic prominence. The innovative feature of this theory is that the prominence of a unit is defined relative to other units in the same phrase. For example, in the most common pronunciation of the phrase "doctors use penicillin", the syllable '-ci-' is the strongest or most stressed syllable in the phrase, but the syllable 'doc-' is more stressed than the syllable '-tors'. Previously, generative phonologists and the American Structuralists represented prosodic prominence as a feature that applied to individual phonemes (segments) or syllables. This feature could take on multiple values to indicate various levels of stress. Stress was assigned using the cyclic reapplication of rules to words and phrases.

The phonology of second languages is different from the phonology of first languages in various ways. The differences are considered to come from general characteristics of second languages, such as slower speech rate, lower proficiency than native speakers, and from the interaction between non-native speakers' first and second languages.

The phonology of Danish is similar to that of the other closely related Scandinavian languages, Swedish and Norwegian, but it also has distinct features setting it apart. For example, Danish has a suprasegmental feature known as stød which is a kind of laryngeal phonation that is used phonemically. It also exhibits extensive lenition of plosives, which is noticeably more common than in the neighboring languages. Because of these and a few other features, spoken Danish can be challenging for Norwegians and Swedes to understand without training, although they can easily read written Danish.

Klaus J. Kohler is a German phonetician.

Lyric setting is the process in songwriting of placing textual content (lyrics) in the context of musical rhythm, in which the lyrical meter and musical rhythm are in proper alignment as to preserve the natural shape of the language and promote prosody.

In Russian phonology and in some other languages, a phonetic word is a sequence of morphemes clustered around one nuclear stress. A phonetic word may contain more than one lexical item.

Prosody is important in English. It conveys many pragmatic functions relating to speech acts, attitude, turn-taking, topic structure, information structure and more. It also helps mark lexical identity, grammatical structure, semantic elements, and more.

References

  1. 1 2 Aubanel, Vincent; Schwartz, Jean-Luc. "The role of isochrony in speech perception in noise". Sci Rep 10, 19580 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-76594-1
  2. ↑ Cummins, Fred (2015). "Rhythm and speech". The handbook of speech production, 158-177.
  3. 1 2 Mark Liberman (May 5, 2008). "Slicing the syllabic bologna". Language Log .
  4. ↑ Cummins, 2015, p. 162.
  5. ↑ Wells, John (2006). English Intonation: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press. p. 3. ISBN   0-521-68380-7.
  6. ↑ Pike, Kenneth L. (1945). The Intonation of American English, vol. 1. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. pp. 34–35.
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  8. ↑ Abercrombie, David (1967). Elements of General Phonetics. Edinburgh U.P. p. 97.
  9. ↑ Mark Liberman (May 6, 2008). "Another slice of prosodic sausage". Language Log .
  10. ↑ Antonio Pamies Bertrán. "Prosodic Typology: On the Dichotomy between Stress-Timed and Syllable-Timed Languages" (PDF).
  11. ↑ Roach, Peter (1982) 'On the distinction between "stress-timed" and "syllable-timed languages", in David Crystal (ed) Linguistic Controversies, Arnold, pp 73–9, http://www.personal.reading.ac.uk/~llsroach/phon2/frp.pdf
  12. 1 2 Ladefoged, Peter (2006). A Course in Phonetics (5th ed.). Thomson. pp.  245–247. ISBN   9781413006889.
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  14. ↑ Low Ee Ling, Grabe, Esther and Nolan, Francis (2000) 'Quantitative characterisations of speech rhythm: syllable-timing in Singapore English', Language and Speech, 43, 377–401.
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  17. ↑ Mok, Peggy (2009). "On the syllable-timing of Cantonese and Beijing Mandarin" (PDF). Chinese Journal of Phonetics. 2: 148–154.
  18. ↑ Mirakyan, Norayr (2016). "The Implications of Prosodic Differences Between English and Armenian" (PDF). Collection of Scientific Articles of YSU SSS. 1.3 (13). YSU Press: 91–96.
  19. ↑ Mok, Peggy; Lee, Sang Im (2008). "Korean speech rhythm using rhythmic measures" (PDF).{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  20. ↑ "Research on linguistic rhythm". unito.it. LFSAG. Retrieved 24 August 2019.
  21. ↑ Harris, Joseph. "Quantifying Speech Rhythms: Perception and Production Data in the Case of Spanish, Portuguese, and English". escholarship.org/. University of California. Retrieved 24 August 2019.
  22. ↑ Clark John, Yallop Collin, Fletcher Janet (2007). Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology. Oxford: Blackwell. pp. (pp)340.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  23. ↑ Verdonschot, Rinus G.; Kiyama, Sachiko; Tamaoka, Katsuo; Kinoshita, Sachiko; La Heij, Wido; Schiller, Niels O. (2011). "The functional unit of Japanese word naming: Evidence from masked priming". Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. 37 (6): 1458–1473. doi:10.1037/a0024491. ISSN   1939-1285.
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  25. ↑ Brown, Charles Phillip (1869). Sanskrit Prosody and Numerical Symbols Explained. Trübner & Company.
  26. ↑ Linguistic Change and the Future of Metrical Persian Poetry Mohsen Mahdavi Mazdeh, Cambridge University
  27. ↑ Musical Rhythm in Persian Poetic Meters Ehsan Shafiee Zargar, University of Texas at Arlington and Hamed Rahmani, Radboud University Nijmegen
  28. ↑ Collins, B.; Mees, I. (2013) [First published 2003]. Practical Phonetics and Phonology: A Resource Book for Students (3rd ed.). Routledge. pp. 135–138. ISBN   978-0-415-50650-2.
  29. ↑ Gimson, A.C. (1989), An Introduction to the Pronunciation of English (4th ed.), London: Edward Arnold
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  31. ↑ Azevedo, Milton Mariano. 2005. Portuguese: a linguistic introduction. P.54
  32. ↑ Silva, David James. 1994. The Variable Elision of Unstressed Vowels in European Portuguese: A Case Study Archived 2012-03-10 at the Wayback Machine
  33. ↑ Grabe, Esther, "Variation Adds to Prosodic Typology", B.Bel and I. Marlin (eds), Proceedings of the Speech Prosody 2002 Conference, 11–13 April 2002, Aix-en-Provence: Laboratoire Parole et Langage, 127–132. ISBN   2-9518233-0-4. (.doc)
  34. ↑ Kenworthy, J. (1987). Teaching English pronunciation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  35. ↑ Archived 2013-06-15 at the Wayback Machine Durational Variability, Low & Grabe
  36. ↑ Grice, M.; D'Imperio, M.; Savino, M.; Avesani, C., 1998. "Strategies for intonation labelling across varieties of Italian" in Hirst, D.; Di Christo, A., 1998. Intonation Systems. Cambridge University Press.
  37. ↑ UTA Working Papers in Linguistics. ed. Susan C. Herring and John C. Paolillo. P.83
  38. ↑ Bisol, leda, PUCRS – O Troqueu Silábico no Sistema Fonológico (Um Adendo ao Artigo de Plínio Barbosa)
  39. ↑ Meireles, Alexsandro R.; Tozetti1, João Paulo; Borges, Rogério R.; Speech rate and rhythmic variation in Brazilian Portuguese Archived 2020-01-16 at the Wayback Machine ; Phonetics Laboratory, Federal University of Espírito Santo, Speech Prosody Studies Group, Brazil
  40. ↑ E. Grabe and E.L. Low (2000) "Durational Variability in Speech and the Rhythm Class Hypothesis", Papers in Laboratory Phonology 7 (The Hague, Mouton)
  41. ↑ Mitchell, T. F. (1969), review of Abercrombie (1967), Journal of Linguistics 5, 153–164
  42. ↑ Dauer, R. (1983) Stress-timing and syllable-timing reanalyzed, Journal of Phonetics 11, 51–62
  43. ↑ Dauer, R. (1987) Phonetic and phonological components of rhythm, Proceedings of the XI Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 447–450
  44. ↑ Dimitrova, S. (1998) "Bulgarian speech rhythm – Syllable-timed or stress-timed?", Journal of the International Phonetic Association 27, 27–33, http://www.personal.reading.ac.uk/~llsroach/phon2/sdjipa.htm
  45. ↑ Olivo, A. M. (2011) Exploring the speech rhythm continuum: evidence from Ashanti Twi, Journal of Speech Sciences 1(2), 3–15; http://www.journalofspeechsciences.org/index.php/journalofspeechsciences/article/view/27/12 Archived 2014-12-27 at the Wayback Machine
  46. ↑ Gibbon, D. & Williams, B. (2007). "Timing Patterns in Welsh". In Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS) XVI.
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