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On the Reliability of Rhythm Metrics

Arvaniti, Amalia, Ross, Tristie, Ferjan, Naja (2008) On the Reliability of Rhythm Metrics. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 124 (4). p. 2495. ISSN 0001-4966. (doi:10.1121/1.4782810) (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:45775)

The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided.
Official URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.4782810

Abstract

In the past decade or so, various metrics of vocalic and consonantal variability have been used to quantify linguistic rhythm, often yielding disparate results. The reliability of several such metrics (percentage of vocalic intervals and consonantal standard deviation, pairwise variability indices, and variation coefficient) was tested using materials from stress-timed English and German, syllable-timed Spanish and Italian, Korean, an unclassified language, and Greek, which has resisted classification. The materials for each language were divided into three subsets: an uncontrolled subset of sentences excerpted from a representative author of each language, a subset exhibiting as much as possible “stress-timing” properties (complex syllable structure and extensive vocalic variability), and a subset exhibiting as much as possible “syllable-timing” properties (simple syllable structure and limited vocalic variability). The results suggest that rhythmic scores can be severely affected by the choice of materials, especially in languages such as Italian, in which it is easy to avoid or accentuate variability (e.g., by excluding or including geminates). Variation coefficient scores were the most resistant to the manipulation of materials but failed to show statistical differences across most of the languages examined. The overall results cast doubt on the reliability of metric scores as indicators of timing and linguistic rhythm.

Item Type: Article
DOI/Identification number: 10.1121/1.4782810
Subjects: P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Arts and Humanities > School of Culture and Languages
Depositing User: Amalia Arvaniti
Date Deposited: 07 Dec 2014 15:54 UTC
Last Modified: 05 Nov 2024 10:29 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/45775 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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