Visualizing Levels of Rhythmic Organization

The paper presents a method to visualize the timing related levels of prosodic organization that have an influence on the rhythmic shape of an utterance. Timing relations can be characteristic of a language or a speaking style. The method is illustrated on various languages classified as stress timed or syllable timed, on a rhythmically unclassified language and L2 speech. The visualization method can be used to detect rhythmically relevant levels of organization within the prosodic hierarchy, e.g. whether rhythm manifests itself primarily on the level of prosodic feet, phrasal organization or reduction. Our method helps to identify language and speaking style related rhythmical preferences and can classify languages rhythmically. It is able to visualize subtle and large differences between stress timed and syllable timed languages and timing related performance problems of L2 speech.