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Speakers vary their speed of speaking according to contextual and physical factors. A typical speaking rate for English is 4 syllables per second, [5] but in different emotional or social contexts the rate may vary, one study reporting a range between 3.3 and 5.9 syl/sec, [6] Another study found significant differences in speaking rate between story-telling and taking part in an interview.
Prosodic bootstrapping (also known as phonological bootstrapping) in linguistics refers to the hypothesis that learners of a primary language (L1) use prosodic features such as pitch, tempo, rhythm, amplitude, and other auditory aspects from the speech signal as a cue to identify other properties of grammar, such as syntactic structure. [1]
Intonation and stress work together to highlight important words or syllables for contrast and focus. [21] This is sometimes referred to as the accentual function of prosody. A well-known example is the ambiguous sentence "I never said she stole my money", where there are seven meaning changes depending on which of the seven words is vocally ...
Stress is a prominent feature of the English language, both at the level of the word (lexical stress) and at the level of the phrase or sentence (prosodic stress).Absence of stress on a syllable, or on a word in some cases, is frequently associated in English with vowel reduction – many such syllables are pronounced with a centralized vowel or with certain other vowels that are described as ...
Declarative sentences show a 2–3–1 pitch pattern. If the last syllable is prominent the final decline in pitch is a glide. For example, in This is fun, this is is at pitch 2, and fun starts at level 3 and glides down to level 1. But if the last prominent syllable is not the last syllable of the utterance, the pitch fall-off is a step.
Isochrony is a linguistic analysis or hypothesis assuming that any spoken language's utterances are divisible into equal rhythmic portions of some kind. Under this assumption, languages are proposed to broadly fall into one of two categories based on rhythm or timing: syllable-timed or stress-timed languages [1] (or, in some analyses, a third category: mora-timed languages). [2]
The Sound Pattern of English (frequently referred to as SPE) is a 1968 work on phonology by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle. In spite of its title, it presents not only a view of the phonology of English, but also discussions of a large variety of phonological phenomena of many other languages. The index lists about 100 such languages.
At 7.5 months English-learning infants have been shown to be able to segment words from speech that show a strong-weak (i.e., trochaic) stress pattern, which is the most common stress pattern in the English language, but they were not able to segment out words that follow a weak-strong pattern.