abstract: Languages have long been studied through the rhythm class framework, which discriminates them into separate classes on the basis of shared rhythmic properties. Originally these differences were attributed to the isochronous timing of different prosodic units, such as stress intervals in “stress-timed” languages and syllables in “syllable-timed” languages. More recent work has turned to durational metrics as a means of evaluating rhythm class, by measuring the variability and proportion of segmental intervals in the speech stream. Both isochrony and durational metrics are no longer viewed as correlative with natural language rhythm, but durational metrics in particular have remained prevalent in the literature. So long as the conclusions of durational metrics are not overextended, their analysis can provide a useful mechanism for assessing the compatibility of a language with a given rhythm class by way of comparative analysis. This study therefore presents a durational-metric comparison of Scottish Gaelic, a language which has frequently been described as stress-timed but has never been empirically tested for rhythm class, with English, a prototypical and well-studied example of a stress-timed language. The Gaelic metric scores for %V (percentage of vocalic content), ΔV (standard deviation in vocalic interval length), and ΔC (standard deviation in consonantal interval length) (Ramus et al. 1999) are shown to be very similar to those measured for English, indicating that the language displays similar patterns of durational variability and segmental proportion typically ascribed to a rhythmically stress-timed language. This provides clear support for the classification of Scottish Gaelic as stress-timed. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Linguistics and Applied Linguistics 2020

Personal characteristics of speech rhythm in Russian newsreading Bc. Irena Čížková Abstract An issue of individual rhythmic characteristics of particular 5 native speakers of the Russian language, newsreaders from the BBC, is described in this thesis. A research of the given 5 speech recordings was conducted based on the academic concepts created by Ramus, Mehler and Nespor, and by Low and Grabe and also by Dellwo, so through a speech rhythm research based on rhythm correlates that are related to vocalic and intervocalic intervals. The recordings were processed in an analyting program called Praat and the extracted results were then evaluated in a statistical processor called STATISTICA. These materials were used for further analysis. The recordings were analysed based on several parameters: %V (proportion of vocalic intervals in one breath group), ∆C and ∆V (standard deviation of the vocalic and consonantal interval duration), PVI-V, PVI-C (Pairwise Variability Index of the vocalic and consonantal interval duration), Varco V and Varco C (variation coefficient of the vocalic and consonantal interval duration) and the difference between duration of stressed and unstressed vowels. Three parameters that were the most successful from the speakers' ability to differentiate point of view were selected through an...