Rhythm Formant Theory(RFT),a modulation-theoretic approach to the physical modelling of speech rhythm,is described and applied in an exploratory analysis of the rhetorical rhythms of read-aloud Mandarin Chinese transl...Rhythm Formant Theory(RFT),a modulation-theoretic approach to the physical modelling of speech rhythm,is described and applied in an exploratory analysis of the rhetorical rhythms of read-aloud Mandarin Chinese translations of the IPA benchmark text The North Wind and the Sun.Rhythm Formant Analysis(RFA),a methodology for empirically investigating Rhythm Formant Theory without prior annotation of the speech signal,is presented in some detail,with the aim of studying rhythm variation in larger units throughout longer texts,rather than restricting analysis to words,phrases and sentences.A test case of read-aloud narratives was investigated,with the null hypothesis that male and female readers do not differ in rhetorical reading strategies.RFA was used to generate vectors of low frequency(LF)variation in spectrograms,for analysis with hierarchical clustering methods.The clustering indicates that the null hypothesis was falsified and rhetorical differences between female and male speakers were tentatively confirmed.Ongoing work includes the analysis of linguistic factors underlying LF variation.In the conclusion,RFT is placed into a more general framework of a Speech Modulation Frequency Scale of modulation types.展开更多
文摘Rhythm Formant Theory(RFT),a modulation-theoretic approach to the physical modelling of speech rhythm,is described and applied in an exploratory analysis of the rhetorical rhythms of read-aloud Mandarin Chinese translations of the IPA benchmark text The North Wind and the Sun.Rhythm Formant Analysis(RFA),a methodology for empirically investigating Rhythm Formant Theory without prior annotation of the speech signal,is presented in some detail,with the aim of studying rhythm variation in larger units throughout longer texts,rather than restricting analysis to words,phrases and sentences.A test case of read-aloud narratives was investigated,with the null hypothesis that male and female readers do not differ in rhetorical reading strategies.RFA was used to generate vectors of low frequency(LF)variation in spectrograms,for analysis with hierarchical clustering methods.The clustering indicates that the null hypothesis was falsified and rhetorical differences between female and male speakers were tentatively confirmed.Ongoing work includes the analysis of linguistic factors underlying LF variation.In the conclusion,RFT is placed into a more general framework of a Speech Modulation Frequency Scale of modulation types.
