Wiget, L., White, L., Schuppler, B., Grenon, I., Rauch, O., & Mattys, S. L. (2010). How stable are acoustic metrics of contrastive speech rhythm? Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 127(3): 1559–1569.
Presentation: Thomas
Summary: Sarah
This paper aimed to investigate the robustness of three proposed rhythmic metrics in the face of different sources of variability. The three metrics were %V (proportion of utterance comprised of vocalic intervals), VarcoV (rate-normalized standard deviation of vocalic interval duration), and nPVI-V (measure of durational variability between successive pairs of vocalic intervals). Factors tested in this study included speaker, material, and measurer. Five sentences were read by six speakers of Standard Southern British English. Measures were five human measurers and one automatic machine aligner. Results showed that among the three rhythmic metrics, nPVI-V was the most resistant to all sources of variability, whereas VarcoV was the least. In addition, it was found that material led to the largest variation, in which rhythmic scores fluctuated the most in different sentence conditions. Speaker and measurer produced the least variation, and high agreement was attained between the human measurers and the automatic aligner. It was therefore concluded by the authors that although the three metrics were generally robust measures, care should be taken, especially in the selection of sentence materials. It was recommended to always use the materials that accurately represent the phonological and metrical structure of the language.
This paper aimed to investigate the robustness of three proposed rhythmic metrics in the face of different sources of variability. The three metrics were %V (proportion of utterance comprised of vocalic intervals), VarcoV (rate-normalized standard deviation of vocalic interval duration), and nPVI-V (measure of durational variability between successive pairs of vocalic intervals). Factors tested in this study included speaker, material, and measurer. Five sentences were read by six speakers of Standard Southern British English. Measures were five human measurers and one automatic machine aligner. Results showed that among the three rhythmic metrics, nPVI-V was the most resistant to all sources of variability, whereas VarcoV was the least. In addition, it was found that material led to the largest variation, in which rhythmic scores fluctuated the most in different sentence conditions. Speaker and measurer produced the least variation, and high agreement was attained between the human measurers and the automatic aligner. It was therefore concluded by the authors that although the three metrics were generally robust measures, care should be taken, especially in the selection of sentence materials. It was recommended to always use the materials that accurately represent the phonological and metrical structure of the language.
