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Assessing the temporal reliability of rhythm metrics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2011

Rachael-Anne Knight
Rachael-Anne Knight*
Affiliation:
Phonetics Laboratories, Department of Language and Communication Science, City University London [email protected]
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Abstract

Despite the current popularity of rhythm metrics, there has been relatively little work aimed at establishing their validity or reliability, important characteristics of any empirical measure. The current paper focuses on the stability, or temporal reliability, of rhythm metrics by establishing if they give consistent results for the same speakers, in the same task, on successive occasions. Four speakers of Southern British English were recorded reading ‘The North Wind and the Sun’ (NWS) passage on three consecutive days. Results indicated that some measures correlate more highly across time than others, and the choice of a measure that is both reliable and valid is discussed. It is suggested that the metric that best fits these criteria is formulated in terms of the proportion of vowels within an utterance (%V).

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the International Phonetic Association , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , December 2011 , pp. 271 - 281
Copyright
Copyright © International Phonetic Association 2011

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