Language Log

We just got the acceptance notice from Interspeech 2008, so it's OK for me to inform you that Associate Justice Antonin Scalia has joined Queen Elizabeth II in the elite ranks of those international celebrities who have served as subjects for experiments in instrumental phonetics. The paper accepted at IS2008 is Jiahong Yuan, Stephen Isard and Mark Liberman, "Different Roles of Pitch and Duration in Distinguishing Word Stress in English".

In fact, not only Justice Scalia, but also seven of the eight other justices on the 2001 Rehnquist court were (unwitting) subjects in our experiment. (Associate Justice Clarence Thomas didn't speak often enough to be included in the analyzed data.) We applied automated measurement techniques to recordings of 78 hours of oral arguments from the 2001 term of the U.S. Supreme court, in order to look at the (average) effects on pitch and time of primary word stress (e.g. the third syllable in jurisdiction), secondary stress (e.g. the first syllable in jurisdiction), and lack of stress (e.g. the second and fourth syllables in jurisdiction).

Most well-informed linguists will probably not find our two main conclusions very surprising — at least, not the content of our conclusions. But there's a methodological suprise, I believe, in the fact that such clear-cut results emerged from automated measurements of medium-quality recordings of natural interactions.

Like I said yesterday, the whole stress-timed-vs.-syllable-timed business is "a gigantic tangled intellectual thicket that’s easy to get into and hard to get out of". And one of the comments on my post asked a question that tempts me in further:

So then there’s a psychological perception of syllable-timed language that is not visible in the objective data?

Yes and no.

Yesterday afternoon, I got this note from John Cowan, that indefatigable correspondent:

You linked to the piece on Romney vs. Giuliani speaking styles today,
so I checked back to see if you ever added my comment on it, but I
think I probably sent it during the period when my mail to you was being mysteriously blackholed. So here it is again.

In fact, I recall getting John's comments the first time. But they brought up a problematic point that deserves a post of its own — the vexed question of "stress-timed" vs. "syllable-timed" languages — and so I put John's note on my to-blog list, where it languished until now. I still don't have time for a proper answer, but I'll respond briefly (hah!) under the rubric of fact-checking.