Language grouping based on pitch interval variability
Diana Stojanovic · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2012
Language rhythm has been discussed so far as a consequence of regularity, phonological differences, and in most recent literature as a result of durational variability. Original support coming from perception experiments is recently often questioned at least in terms of how well listeners can classify language samples stripped of all but durational information. In particular, pitch has been suggested to play a significant role in perceiving rhythmic differences. In Patel 2006, language and music rhythm differences between English and French were measured by means of durational and melodic measures. It was shown that the variability of pitches did not distinguish between two languages, but the variability of pitch excursions was significant. In this paper, we use pitch excursion variability as a measure applied to read samples of several languages. Preliminary results on 30 sec samples show that Brazilian Portuguese, French, Hawaiian, and Indonesian group together compared to English and German. The first group has more frequent but less prominent excursions (60 Hz) while the second group has less frequent but larger excursions (100Hz). Based on these results, originally proposed regularity can at least partly be explained by the variability of pitch intervals, grouping languages into “smooth” vs. “more prominent”.