show an interesting difference in this distribution, namely a predominance for long-long and long-short- sequences in French, while English is slightly dominated by short-long-sequences (cf. Figure4.9). The comparatively large number of long-long sequences in French may add to the impression of French having less alternations and a general tendency towards deceleration. Both languages favour short-short-sequences the least.
Figure 4.9: The Figure depicts the different concentrations of sequences in the different relative tim-ing quadrants. The left (grey) number indicates the percentage of timtim-ing relations in English, the right (blue) one for French. The count indicates a slight predominance of French to favour sequences of long or long-short sequences, while English slightly favours short-long sequences.
foot boundaries. The foot is chosen as an important unit of rhythmical organization, since in Chapter2it was found to be linked to auditory time perception, namely the window of temporal present. Beats assembled into a foot, are typically perceived as belonging together thus forming a perceptual gestalt. Since the window of tempo-ral present is apparently constrained by absolute time, ranging between 400—600 ms, we will concentrate on absolute time values rather than normalized durations as in the previous section. We are now looking at long-term characterstics of such windows, in order to detect timing regularities that listeners can learn in order to form certain expectations concerning upcoming rhythmical events. Such long-term expectations are what we defined as meter. Metrical hypotheses can be verified or falsified by the perceptual input, but should make good predictions in the major-ity of cases. It can be expected, that such hypotheses are much more often falsified in ordinary speech compared to stylized speaking styles such as poetry. However, traces of such regularities should remain. In a first approach to visualize such long term foot-internal tendencies for our two example languages, the average timing properties were plotted for feet of different sizes in order to unveil differences, sim-ilarities and typical long-term patterns. In a first step, mean durations and variation coefficients were calculated for binary, ternary and quaternary feet for our two pro-totypical languages. The results are depicted in Table4.3and Figure4.10.
Language (Footlength) Metric Syll 1 Syll 2 Syll 3 Syll 4 French (2)
mean dur (ms) 144 208 var. coeff (%) 50 46 English (2)
mean dur (ms) 227 169 var. coeff (%) 35 57 French (3)
mean dur (ms) 112 159 161 var. coeff (%) 26 22 60 English (3)
mean dur (ms) 215 122 129 var. coeff (%) 47 42 74 French (4)
mean dur (ms) 125 162 191 181
var. coeff (%) 44 36 44 48
English (4)
mean dur (ms) 169 117 155 90
var. coeff (%) 36 29 45 44
Table 4.3: Mean durations and variation coefficients for binary, ternary and quaternary feet in English and French.
With regards to durational variation expressed in the mean-normalized varia-tion coefficient, no clear preference for either language showing less or more is ev-ident. The calculations show once more confirm that accentual lengthening effects in French are more subtle compared to English. However, it also shows that foot final lengthening in French is only evident for binary feet. In longer feet, the du-rational increase propagates throughout the foot and is not restricted to the final syllable. In English however, we can clearly see the tendency of binary alterna-tion in longer feet, which is not present in French. Thus, it seems that the French
“iambic” effect is not the result of a local lengthening of the foot final syllable, but results out of a deceleration tendency throughout the foot. Alternatively, English
Figure 4.10: The Figures show the average durations in binary, ternary and quaternary feet for French (left) and English (right).
Figure 4.11: The Figures show the average relative durations in binary (red), ternary (blue) and quaternary feet (green) for French (left) and English (right). The beginnings and ends of each group are indicated with the labelsstartandend. French groups typically start with a transition from a long to a short syllable and then have the tendency to increase beat durations throughout the foot. English starts with a long beat followed by one or two short ones. In quaternary feet, a strict alternating pattern is evident.
is once more shown to be characterized by a strong tendency towards alternation, creating a regular trochaic or — in the case of ternary feet — dactylic pattern. It is well possible, that this foot-internal difference between French and English is re-sponsible for many rhythm related effects. In Section 2.3.1, the perceptual effect of time-shrinkingwas introduced. Time-shrinking has the effect that in decelerating in-terval sequences, the consecutive inin-tervals are perceived as more isochronous than they acoustically are. Time shrinking can propagate across several sequences but is blocked by strict alternation, as it is typically found in English. Thus, time shrinking may at least partly account for the often reported perceptual impression of French being more isochronous than English.
The phenomenon of time shrinking can be traced in Figure4.11, where the long-term patterns are once more illustrated in the time-delay plots introduced in the previous section, only with absolute durations being shown. The lines show the shapes of relative durations followed throughout the different feet, e.g. in the En-glish plot, the binary foot (red line) is initiated by a transition from a shorter to a longer beat and ends with a transition from the long to another short beat. Fur-thermore, the plots show the typical French pattern of starting with a short beat
— relative to the previous foot-final one and then showing a tendency to lengthen, though subtly, throughout the foot. The foot-final beat is (on average) not longer than the penultimate one. The similarity between the patterns for French feet of different length is striking! Another rhythm related phenomenon that can be traced with the help of these long-term time-delay plots is compensatory shortening intro-duced in Section 2.4.1.2. In the case of compensatory shortening, i.e. the tendency to shorten beats as a function of the number of syllables contained in the foot, the long-term patterns would have to be distributed in different regions of the graph, with longer feet being oriented more towards the lower left quadrant. Obviously, no compensatory shortening takes place in French, since the different patterns al-most overlap in the two-dimensional space. In comparison, the English long-term patterns show a very pronounced distance between stressed and unstressed beats.
Also, they show the strong tendency towards alternation in the quaternary feet that is indicated by the almost perfect overlap of lines. Unstressed beats in ternary feet are almost identical in length (on average). In English, all foot internal syllables are affected by compensatory shortening, the stressed ones somewhat more than the
unstressed ones. Since compensatory shortening obviously plays a role in English, a mere measurement of syllable duration as an estimate of presence of accentuation must fall too short — the timing in the vicinity of the presumably stressed syllable obviously plays an important role and needs to be taken into account when trying to find evidence for accentual lengthening. In the terminology of a coupled oscilla-tor approach to timing, this indicates a higher coupling between feet and syllables in English compared to French. However, it is important to stress that a theory of coupling does not seem to be sufficient for a description of the foot-internal timing patterns that distinguish between French and English.