The Location of Rhythmic Stress Beats in English: an Experimental Study I

Abstract

This study examines the perceived location of rhythmic stress beats in sentences drawn from spontaneous conversation. Subjects listened to each sentence repeatedly from a tape loop and located the beats associated with various syllables in three ways: first, they tapped their fingers in time to the rhythm of the sentence; second, they moved an audible click around in the sentence until they felt it occurred at the same time that they would have tapped in the first task; third, they heard an audible click superimposed on the sentence near a rhythmic beat and were asked to judge whether or not the click "hit the beat". The times of occurrence of the subjects' taps, their placements of the movable click, and their judgments of which clicks hit the beat were compared as beat locations and were found to be in general agreement: the rhythmic beats were closely associated with the onsets of the nuclear vowels of the stressed syllables, but precede those vowel onsets by an amount positively correlated with the length of the initial consonant(s) of the syllable. This finding suggests that rhythmic beats in English are centred around a ballistic release of the initial consonants into the stressed vowels, this release involving respiratory, laryngeal and articulatory activity. The reliability of a subject's beat locating responses to a syllable was positively correlated with the degree of stress on that syllable, i.e., the more stress there is on a syllable, the more accurately can a listener locate the rhythmic beat of that syllable. Both the actual locations of the beats and the correlation of accuracy with degree of stress give meaning to the notion that English is a stress timed language.