A quantitative typological study

12th Conference of the Association for Linguistic Typology (ALT), 11th-15th December 2017 Canberra, Australia

Are some languages spoken more quickly than others? A quantitative typological study Gertraud Fenk-Oczlon Alpen-Adria Universität, Klagenfurt, Austria

Overview • General question: Is speech rate part of the linguistic structure of languages? • How to measure speech rate across languages?

Common impressions and old scepticism • “Speakers of some languages seem to rattle

away at high speed like machine-guns, while other languages sound rather slow and plodding” (Roach 1998:150)

• “Whether there are differences in the rates of speech of speakers with different linguistic backgrounds is not well known” (Lehiste 1972:52). • Only inter-individual differences in speech rate?

How to measure the “basic” or “intrinsic” speech rate of languages? in a way that is • abstracting from the enormous interindividual and situation dependent variation in speech rate, and from its variation depending on age, gender, education, etc. • directly based on differences in the linguistic structure of languages • appropriate for large-scale comparisons

Tempo Fraisse (1982): “One of the perceptual aspects of rhythmic organization is tempo. It can be lively or slow. It corresponds to the number of perceived elements per unit time …”

Measuring tempo across languages: number of syllables per intonation unit In Fenk-Oczlon and Fenk (2010) we suggested and applied the simple metric “syllables per intonation unit” in order to analyze and compare languages with respect to their intrinsic tempo, a metric that does without any measuring of duration

Measuring intrinsic tempo across languages: number of syllables per clause – The clause or simple declarative sentence (coding one proposition) is relevant for rhythmic organization and universally comparable: – It corresponds to a prototypical intonation unit that can be characterized as “a sequence of words combined under a single, coherent intonation contour” between two pauses, and a length of typically two seconds (Chafe 1987) – The relevant element of the intonation unit, or the single pulse within this quantity - is not the word but the syllable

Method • Native speakers of 51 languages from all continents (19 Indo-European, 32 Non-Indo-European) were asked to translate 22 simple declarative sentences encoding one proposition in one intonation unit • Subjects were furthermore instructed to read their translations in normal speech and to count the number of syllables

Sentences (1) The child is waiting for its meal. (2) The sun is shining. (3) Blood is red. (4) I think of you. (5) Our neighbour is a farmer. (6) She trusts her friend. (7) She sings. (8) A father looks after his family. (9) The girl is industrious. (10) I thank the teacher. (11) The spring is on the right.

(12) My girlfriend is helping me. (13) My brother is a hunter. (14) The water is cold. (15) The dog is outside. (16) My father is a fisherman. (17) Grandfather is sleeping. (18) A mother loves her son . (19) Aunty is at home. (20) My sister is collecting wood. (21) He is building a hut. (22) It´s raining.

Results Our sample of 51 languages shows a considerable variation of the number of syllables per simple declarative sentence • ranging from 4.64 in Thai up to 10.96 in Telugu and a mean number of 7.02 syllables per clause

The mean number of syllables per clause in 51 languages

from: Fenk-Oczlon & Fenk 2010:1538

Further results • the mean number of phonemes per syllable is 2.24 – German shows the highest mean syllable complexity (2.79 phonemes per syllable), followed by Dutch (2.78) and Thai (2.75) – The languages with the lowest syllable complexity Hawaiian (1.76 phonemes per syllable), Japanese (1.88) and Roviana (1.92)

The more syllables per clause, the fewer phonemes per syllable? Hypothesis: A negative correlation between the number of phonemes per syllable and the number of syllables per clause The result: r = – 0.73 (sign. p < 0. 01)

The more syllables per clause, the higher the intrinsic tempo We view these differences as differences in the intrinsic tempo of languages:

The smaller the syllables, the higher the number of syllables per intonation unit and the higher the tempo – similar to music where in “phrases containing many notes, the notes are usually very fast” (Temperley 2001)

Intrinsic tempo and information transmission rate • In other words: Languages characterized by a rather small number of syllables per intonation unit produce a lower number of pulses per intonation unit, but need a higher number of phonemes per syllable • Thus, a higher intrinsic tempo of a certain language does NOT indicate a higher information transmission rate in that language

Intrinsic tempo and information transmission rate • Pellegrino et al. (2011) found a negative correlation between information density and speech rate that can be related to our correlation. They determined the mean number of syllables per second in seven different languages. Despite this different measure, the results concerning the order of languages as to speech rate in syllables were very similar to ours e.g.: Mandarin and German belong to the slow, Japanese and Spanish to the fast languages

The more syllables per clause, the fewer phonemes per syllable • The cross-linguistic correlation between number of syllables per clause and number of phonemes per syllable indicates time limits being effective on clause length which force a trade-off between the length of syllables in number of phonemes and the length of clauses in number of syllables – psychological present ∼ 2 sec (10 short syllables or 5 complex syllables correspond to about 2 sec)

• the segmentation of natural languages and especially the limited size of clauses can be viewed as the result of selforganizing processes accounting for such physiological and cognitive constraints

Intrinsic Tempo and Speech Rhythm Our results concerning intrinsic tempo were also related to well-known metrics proposed in the literature for differentiating between languages labeled as stress-timed vs. syllabletimed or mora-timed

Intrinsic tempo and speech rhythm • Languages traditionally labeled as stresstimed such as English or German tend to have a slower tempo than syllable-timed languages. • Languages usually labeled as mora-timed, such as Japanese, Telugu and Hawaiian, exhibit the highest number of syllables per intonation unit.

Intrinsic tempo and speech rhythm • These assumptions were corroborated by significant correlations between our metrics with well-known metrics differentiating between stress-timed and syllable-timed language (Ramus et al. 1999; Grabe and Low 2002)

Significant correlations between our tempo measures and measures used in Ramus et al. 1999 for differentiating between rhythm classes

(from Fenk-Oczlon & Fenk 2010)

Associations between speech rate and other metric and non-metric variables low speech rate

high speech rate

low number of syllables per clause

high number of syllables per clause

high number of phonemes syllable

low number of phonemes per syllable

low number of syllables per word

high number of syllables per word

high number of words per clause

low number of words per clause

low number of morphological cases

high number of morphological cases

fusional or isolating

agglutinative

high number of monosyllables

low number of monosyllables

stress-timed

syllable-timed

tendency to prepositions

tendency to postpositions

SVO

SOV

Adapted from Fenk-Oczlon & Fenk 2005

Conclusion • We suggested and applied the simple metric “syllables per intonation unit” in order to analyze and compare languages with respect to their intrinsic tempo. i.e., a metric that is – directly based on differences in the linguistic structure of languages – independent of intra- and inter-individual differences – appropriate for large-scale comparisons • Moreover, we presented correlations between the metric “number of syllables per intonation unit” and other metric and non metric variables in our framework of Systemic Typology

Selected References •

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Chafe, W. (1987). Cognitive constraints on information flow. In R.S. Tomlin (ed.), Coherence and Grounding in Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 21-25 Fenk-Oczlon G., Fenk A. (1985). The mean length of propositions is 7 plus minus 2 syllables – but the position of languages within this range is not accidental. In G. d’Ydevalle (ed.) Cognition, Information Processing, and Motivation. Amsterdam: North Holland, 355-359 Fenk-Oczlon, G. & Fenk, A. (2005). Crosslinguistic correlations between size of syllables, number of cases, and adposition order. In G. Fenk-Oczlon & Ch. Winkler (eds.) Sprache und Natürlichkeit. Gedenkband für Willi Mayerthaler. Tübingen: Narr, 75-86 Fenk-Oczlon, G. & Fenk, A. (2010). Measuring basic tempo across languages and some implications for speech rhythm. Proceedings of the 11th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH 2010), Makuhari, Japan, 1537-1540 Fraisse, P. (1982). Rhythm and tempo. In D. Deutsch (ed.), The psychology of music New York: Academic Press, 149-180

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Grabe, E. & Low, E. L. (2002). Durational variability in speech and the rhythm class hypothesis”, in C. Gussenhoven & N. Warner (eds.), Laboratory Phonology, VII. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 515-546 Lehiste, I. (1972). The Timing of Utterances and Linguistic Boundaries. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 51, 2018-2024 Ramus, F., Nespor, M. & Mehler, J. (1999) Correlates of linguistic rhythm in the speech signal, Cognition, 73, 265-292 Pellegrino F., Coupé C., & Marsico, E. (2011). A cross-language perspective of speech information rate. Language, 87, 539-558 Roach, P. (1998). Some languages are spoken more quickly than others. In L. Bauer & P. Trudgill (eds.) Language Myths. London: Penguin, 150-158 Temperley, D. (2001). The cognition of basic musical structures. Cambridge MA/London: MIT Press