2009/11/11

Jian, H.-Li. (2004). On the syllable timing in Taiwan English. Proceedings of the 4^th Speech Prosody Conference, 247–250.

Presentation: Sally

Summary: Shelly

For EFL or ESL speakers, the rhythm of their English will often be influenced by their L1. For example, previous studies have shown that Singaporean English is more syllable-timed than stress-timed. Based on the same rationale, one should be able to find that Taiwan English is syllable-timed, since Taiwan Mandarin and Min are both syllable-timed. In order to confirm this hypothesis, the author used the pair-wise variability index to measure the variation of vowel length in the English spoken by Taiwanese and American speakers. Results showed that compared to American English, the variation of vowel length between full and reduced vowels in Taiwan English are approximately the same, which indicated that Taiwanese speakers are utilizing syllable-timed rhythm when they speak English, and the hypothesis is thus confirmed.

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Mok, P. P. K. & Dellwo, V. (2008). Comparing native and non-native speech rhythm using acoustic rhythmic measures: Cantonese, Beijing Mandarin and English. Proceedings of the 4^th Speech Prosody Conference, 423–426.

This study uses several acoustic rhythmic measures to examine the speech rhythm of two syllable-timed languages: Cantonese and Beijing Mandarin, and also the accented English of the two: Cantonese English and Beijing Mandarin English. Previous studies showed that the two languages, Cantonese and Beijing Mandarin, are syllable-timed according to impressionistic observations. However, it is also reported that no acoustic evidence indicates the existence of isochronous syllable duration in these languages, which contradicts previous observations. One possible reason is that the acoustic measurements used before were not good enough in representing such an auditory effect. Therefore, the present study aims to solve this problem by examining results obtained by different measurements, and see which one could best separate the two syllable-timed languages from the stress-timed languages (German and English). There were seven acoustic measurements performed on the recorded materials, which were:

ΔC: the standard deviation of consonantal durations

ΔV: the standard deviation of vocalic durations

ΔS: the standard deviation of syllabic durations

%V: the proportion of vocalic durations within a sentence

VarcoC: (ΔC / mean consonantal duration) × 100

VarcoV: (ΔV / mean vocalic duration) × 100

VarcoS: (ΔS / mean syllabic duration) × 100

The main purpose of using these measurements was to capture the variance of adjacent segments, which should be bigger in stress-timed than in syllable-timed languages due to reduced vowels. Results showed that all the above rhythmic measures confirm the syllable-timing impression of Cantonese and Beijing Mandarin, and VarcoC and %V are the best of all. However, for Cantonese English and Beijing Mandarin English, some measurements group them with stress-timed languages, while others with syllable-timed. The author suggested that this discrepancy indicated that more studies on second language rhythm are needed to address this issue.