Page 259 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Unit 18: Rhythm

In general, it seems that the Australian English of the control participant has a similar rhythm to Notes
British English. Halliday classified British and Australian speech as being more rhythmically
regular than American or Canadian speech, and phonologically Australian English is much closer
to Received Pronunciation (RP) than many other varieties of English. These similarities would, of
course, be expected given the pattern of immigration from England to Australia in the late 1700s
although there are of course many phonetic differences between Australian and British English
which have developed over the intervening time. One particular difference between the two
varieties occurs in intonation. Since the 1970s many speakers of Australian English have begun to
produce statements that end in a high rising nuclear tone. By contrast, RP statements tend to end
in a falling tone (although the Australian pattern is now used by many younger speakers of British
English). This prosodic difference between the two varieties might have suggested there would
also be a rhythmical difference. However, the rhythm of the control participant, who is a speaker
of Australian English, appears to be highly stress-timed like the rhythm of British English. This is
likely due to the shared phonological characteristics of the two languages (such as vowel reduction
and onset and coda complexity) and we await the results of further speakers to see if this result
can be generalised to Australian English as a whole.

Relationship of RHD Participant to the Control Participant and to Other PVI Measures
For the RHD speaker we can see that there is a more syllable-timed rhythm than that found for the
control participant or speakers of British English. This more syllable-timed rhythm was perhaps,
therefore, the underlying reason for the speech pathologist's perception of unnatural prosody in
the speech of this client. The results show that the significant difference between the two speakers
comes from the more regular intervocalic intervals used by the participant with right hemisphere
damage. Although the RHD participant also appears to use more regular vocalic intervals, there
is no significant difference when compared to the normal control participant. This may suggest
that the patient with right hemisphere damage is avoiding complex consonant clusters. However,
the large, albeit non significant differences found for vocalic intervals suggest that other factors
are also at work, and further explorations with more controlled data are needed before a firm
conclusion can be drawn.
Another important issue is the description of the current RHD speaker's rhythm as 'syllable-
timed'. This description is probably best avoided for two reasons. Firstly, as discussed above,
rhythm is now generally believed to be a gradient phenomenon rather than the strict dichotomy
between stress- and syllable-timed languages proposed by Abercrombie. Indeed, in their
classification of different languages, Grabe and Low point out that, although the nVoc PVI perhaps
gives a categorical split, the rInt PVI gives a gradient distribution. The second difficulty comes
when comparing the RHD speaker's PVI values to those for other languages. The rInt PVI of 52 is
quite similar to those Grabe and Low found for the classically syllable-timed languages of French
(50) and Spanish (58). However, the nVoc PVI of 61 can certainly not be described as syllable-
timed, as French and Spanish have values of 44 and 30 respectively. Rather than describing the
rhythm as syllable-timed, it seems most sensible to say that this speaker produces speech that is
less strongly stress-timed than that of the control participant, or the British English speakers
reported in the literature.
It is also interesting to consider how this finding relates to other findings of dysprosody in speakers
with RHD. As discussed above, the evidence supporting lateralisation of prosody to the right
hemisphere is equivocal. This is especially true for linguistic prosody, but there is perhaps some
weak evidence for lateralisation of affective prosody to the right hemisphere. Nevertheless the
general consensus of opinion is that some elements of, or cues to, prosody reside in the right
hemisphere. As mentioned above, rhythm cannot be classified as either a linguistic or affective
aspect of prosody. It is, in fact, more akin to the phonological inventory of a particular language
and a deficit at this level suggests a deep-seated, albeit subtle impairment. The evidence presented

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