Lin Chia-Yuan, Rathcke Tamara
Centre for Cognition and Neuroscience, Department of Social and Psychological Sciences, University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, United Kingdom.
Department of Linguistics, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2025 Jul 18;16:1544948. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1544948. eCollection 2025.
Modulations of amplitude rise-time are considered fundamental to speech rhythm. However, rise-time is a holistic measure of the waveform shape and, as such, may be influenced by a variety of factors, potentially obscuring relationships between speech rhythm, signal acoustics, and linguistic structure. To address the factors that can modulate the rise-time of amplitude envelopes in English and the impact that rise-time modulations may have on rhythm perception in natural connected speech, we recorded 52 English sentences produced by a native female speaker and examined the effect of metrical weight, nucleus duration, average intensity, syllable onset complexity and sonority on rise-time duration in these sentences. As expected, amplitude rise-time was reflective of both acoustic-phonetic (nucleus duration and average intensity) and linguistic (onset complexity and metrical weight) factors. In addition, we conducted a sensorimotor synchronization experiment in which 31 native English speakers tapped in time with the beat of the recorded sentences. Analyses of synchronization showed that rise-time played a limited role in explaining rhythmic variability in these data. Taken together, the present findings indicate that rise-time cannot be straightforwardly mapped onto a specific linguistic function or a specific feature of the acoustic speech signal and is, therefore, difficult to interpret meaningfully. These results highlight a complex relationship between rise-time and speech rhythm and raise critical implications for speech rhythm research based on holistic acoustic measures such as rise-time.
振幅上升时间的调制被认为是言语节奏的基础。然而，上升时间是波形形状的一种整体度量，因此可能受到多种因素的影响，这可能会模糊言语节奏、信号声学和语言结构之间的关系。为了研究能够调节英语中振幅包络上升时间的因素，以及上升时间调制可能对自然连贯言语中的节奏感知产生的影响，我们录制了一位以英语为母语的女性说出的52个英语句子，并研究了韵律重音、核心时长、平均强度、音节起始复杂度和响度对这些句子中上升时间持续时间的影响。正如预期的那样，振幅上升时间反映了声学语音学（核心时长和平均强度）和语言学（起始复杂度和韵律重音）两方面的因素。此外，我们进行了一项感觉运动同步实验，让31位以英语为母语的人随着录制句子的节拍同步敲击。同步分析表明，上升时间在解释这些数据中的节奏变异性方面作用有限。综合来看，目前的研究结果表明，上升时间不能直接映射到特定的语言功能或声学语音信号的特定特征上，因此难以进行有意义的解释。这些结果凸显了上升时间与言语节奏之间的复杂关系，并对基于上升时间等整体声学度量的言语节奏研究提出了关键启示。
