The rhythmic organization of speech into regular intervals (i.e. isochrony), is a strong perceptual phenomenon. However, Investigators have been unable to demonstrate the existence of isochrony in production data. It is hypothesized in this study that the intended rhythm of a speaker is in fact isochronous, but that this is obscured by several distorting influences which introduce durational irregularity at the syllable level, e.g. intrinsic duration, stress, position of the syllable in a phrase and number of syllables in a phrase. It is proposed that removing the predictable durational irregularities will yield a more regular signal, reflecting the (hypothesized) Intended Isochronous rhythm of the speaker. The latter two sources of distortion introduce progressive durational irregularity or "warping" which can be readily incorporated into an automated "dewarplng" procedure. A computer program was devised to compensate, at the syllable level for these two sources of distortion. The former two sources are not amenable to such an automated procedure, and were therefore not included. The "dewarping" program was run on the speech amplitude envelopes of two speakers, one French and one English.
The results indicate that, for the French speaker, dewarping does remove some of the durational Irregularity, yielding a more regular amplitude envelope. For the English speaker, no such Improvement in regularity is obtained. This indicates that the dewarping used, which presumes the syllable as "unit" of dewarping, is appropriate for syllable-timed languages such as French, but inappropriate for stress-timed languages such as English. It therefore provides some support for isochrony in French at the syllable level. Finally, the results also give support to the hypothesis that the degree of warping perceived as regular in speech perception studies corresponds to the degree of dewarping which, conversely, yields the most regular speech amplitude envelope; however, further experimentation is necessary to determine the optimum values of the parameters of the dewarping function. / Medicine, Faculty of / Audiology and Speech Sciences, School of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/24587 |
| Date | January 1985 |
| Creators | Caulfield, Anne Jeanette |
| Publisher | University of British Columbia |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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