Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Bristol, 12a Priory Road, Bristol BS8 1TU, United Kingdom.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2010 Mar;127(3):1559-69. doi: 10.1121/1.3293004.
Acoustic metrics of contrastive speech rhythm, based on vocalic and intervocalic interval durations, are intended to capture stable typological differences between languages. They should consequently be robust to variation between speakers, sentence materials, and measurers. This paper assesses the impact of these sources of variation on the metrics %V (proportion of utterance comprised of vocalic intervals), VarcoV (rate-normalized standard deviation of vocalic interval duration), and nPVI-V (a measure of the durational variability between successive pairs of vocalic intervals). Five measurers analyzed the same corpus of speech: five sentences read by six speakers of Standard Southern British English. Differences between sentences were responsible for the greatest variation in rhythm scores. Inter-speaker differences were also a source of significant variability. However, there was relatively little variation due to segmentation differences between measurers following an agreed protocol. An automated phone alignment process was also used: Rhythm scores thus derived showed good agreement with the human measurers. A number of recommendations for researchers wishing to exploit contrastive rhythm metrics are offered in conclusion.
基于元音和元音之间的间隔持续时间的对比语音节奏声学指标，旨在捕捉语言之间稳定的类型学差异。因此，它们应该不受说话者、句子材料和测量者之间的变化的影响。本文评估了这些变化源对指标 %V（由元音间隔组成的话语比例）、VarcoV（元音间隔持续时间标准化率的标准偏差）和 nPVI-V（测量连续对元音间隔之间的时长可变性）的影响。五位测量者分析了相同的语音语料库：六位标准南方英国英语说话者朗读的五个句子。句子之间的差异是节奏得分变化最大的原因。说话者之间的差异也是一个重要的变异来源。然而，由于按照协议进行分段的测量者之间存在相对较小的差异，因此变化很小。还使用了自动电话对齐过程：由此得出的节奏得分与人工测量者非常吻合。最后为希望利用对比节奏指标的研究人员提供了一些建议。
