The role of prominences in typologically different rhythms

ESPINOSA GONZALO E.

Poznan

Congreso; 9th International Conference on Speech Prosody; 2018

Speech rhythm is understood as a byproduct of phonetic and phonological characteristics like syllabic structure, vowel reduction and the role of accent. In order to capture these properties, several rhythm metricshave been proposed in the literature so as to give an account of different aspects of rhythm. The aim of this study is tofocus on the role of accent, as manifested in the prominencesofan utterance,in the timing patterns oftwo typologically different rhythms represented by Spanish andEnglish.Two rhythm metrics, %V and VarcoV, have been chosen in order tomeasure the production of a specially designed reading taskbyspeakers from Patagonia, south of Argentina, as well asthe southeast of England and the northeast of the United States. Results indicate that (1) there is a significant effect of prominences in the two English varieties, but not in Spanish, as shown by %V and VarcoV, and (2) there is a categoricaldifference between rhythm types, as shown by VarcoV.