Speech Rhythm in English and Japanese
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Abstract
Two "speech cycling" experiments were conducted to examine how English - a so-called "stress-timed" language - and Japanese - a so-called "mora-timed" language - might behave when speakers are told to repeat phrases with a prescribed rhythm. Experiment 1 demonstrated that manipulation of inherent vowel duration in minimally contrasting phrases such as "GO for BYga DAY" vs. "GO for BUG-eye DAY" leads to a greater perturbation of the timing of the vowel onsets if the manipulation is internal to a foot, as above, than if it crosses two feet, as in "GO by GUNner DAY" vs. "GOba GUYner DAY". The temporal stability of foot-initial syllables was observed in both English and in analogous Japanese phrases, and can be taken as a phonetic correlate of foot-level structure. Experiment 2 revealed that manipulation of the number of syllables in foot-level units in phrases such as "GO to BAker NOW" vs. "GO to the BAker NOW" leads to greater temporal perturbation in Japanese than in English, providing some evidence for cross-linguistic rhythmic variation. These results suggest that speech cycling reveals language-specific as well as universal aspects of rhythmic organization of spoken language.
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