Patel, A. D., Iversen, J. R., & Rosenberg, J. C. (2006). Comparing the rhythm and melody of speech and music: The case of British English and French. Journal of Acoustical Society of America, 119 (5), 3034–3047.
Presentation: Shelly
Summary: Sally
It has been proposed by both musicologists and linguists that prosody of a culture’s native language can be reflected in its music. Two questions were investigated in this study: (1) Are differences in durational contrast a byproduct of variability? (2) Is speech melody reflected in music? Quantitative methods were applied to answer these questions for both English and French: normalized pairwise variability index (nPVI) and coefficient of variation (CV), two dimensionless quantities only sensitive to relative durations, were adopted as rhythmic measures; prosogram, a measure based on pitch change, was used for melodic analyses. Results showed that variability difference (CV) could not account for nPVI differences. The durational differences are thus highly unlikely to be a byproduct of variability differences. In addition, music was found to reflect durational contrastiveness (but not durational variability) in speech. In terms of melody, English speech showed greater interval variability than French speech, and the same pattern was also observed for music. This finding has been tested theoretically and empirically in recent studies regarding intonational phonology. Finally, the authors proposed cross-domain comparisons for future research, especially on the analyses of nonnative prosody. This is because speakers’ prosodic distance from a target language they are acquiring can easily be quantified via the rhythm-melody space, a multi-dimensional way to reveal the close rhythm-melody relations.
