A musical model of speech rhythm

Abstract

. . iambic [is] the verse-form closest to speech. There is evidence of this: we speak iambics in conversation with each other very often. . . .Aristotle in PoeticsMuch work on speech has been driven far more by a desire to classify languages into categories than by the need to elucidate the actual rhythms of spoken utterances. Common approaches to speech focus, for example, on the variability of syllabic durations within utterances (Grabe & Low, 2002) or the proportion of an utterance's duration that is occupied by vowels (Ramus, Nespor, & Mehler, 1999). But these features do not specify actual rhythms-that is, the temporal patterns of syllable onsets within an utterance-and instead reduce whole languages to descriptive statistics. Knowing that English is 40% vocalic (Ramus et al., 1999) indicates little about the timing of syllable onsets within any given English utterance, even though this information may be useful in differentiating English taxonomically from languages having different types of syllable structure.Outside of linguistics, though, representations of sentence rhythms are commonplace, and it is unclear why such representations have not had a larger impact on linguistic theories. Poetic verse, song, Shakespearean dialogue, and rap are all based on musical notions of the periodicity of syllable onsets. Consider the rhythmic transcription of the text of the children's song Twinkle Twinkle shown in Figure 1a. The is organized as a two-beat cycle alternating between…