Inter-word intervals again
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In "Analysis of prosodic timing in reading" (4/5/2026), I suggested that inter-word timings in fluent reading can give a surprisingly clear picture of prosodic phrasing, despite the many other effects on word durations in speech.
That post looked at data from the Speech Accent Archive, which involves reading a short and somewhat weird passage. Since then, I've explored readings of a variety of other texts, so far only in English. The results continue to look promising.
For today, I'll show a small additional result, from seven readings of Jane Austen's novel Emma:
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
Six of the readings are from LibriVox, and one is a professional audiobook version.
Here's a plot of median durations for the 40 "words" in the first sentence. All of the inter-word duration peaks correspond to plausible phrase junctures, except for the minor local maximum on twenty-one ("word" #28), which really should be divided into two lexical units:
1 EMMA
2 WOODHOUSE
3 HANDSOME
4 CLEVER
5 AND
6 RICH
7 WITH
8 A
9 COMFORTABLE
10 HOME
11 AND
12 HAPPY
13 DISPOSITION
14 SEEMED
15 TO
16 UNITE
17 SOME
18 OF
19 THE
20 BEST
21 BLESSINGS
22 OF
23 EXISTENCE
24 AND
25 HAD
26 LIVED
27 NEARLY
28 *TWENTY-ONE*
29 YEARS
30 IN
31 THE
32 WORLD
33 WITH
34 VERY
35 LITTLE
36 TO
37 DISTRESS
38 OR
39 VEX
40 HER
And here are the seven different readings plotted separately:
The rest of the book, and the other readings that I've checked, show a similar fit between phrasing and timing.
(Note: In case you didn't catch it in the earlier post, let me remind you that silent pauses are added to the "inter-word duration" associated with the previous word…)
Chris Button said,
May 21, 2026 @ 5:12 pm
Might I suggest extending the study by mapping it onto a prosodic analysis to:
– examine how it correlates with intonation (pitch and contour)
– exclude the effects of pre-pausal lengthening
Mark Liberman said,
May 22, 2026 @ 7:36 am
@Chris Button: "Might I suggest extending the study by mapping it onto a prosodic analysis to: examine how it correlates with intonation (pitch and contour); exclude the effects of pre-pausal lengthening"
The relationship to pitch modulation is interesting, and worth exploring, though it's complex and variable.
As for pre-pausal lengthening, the whole point is that (in fluent reading) the combination of pre-pausal lengthening and silent pause insertion means that inter-onset timing gives a surprisingly consistent picture of phrase structure.
There are lots of theoretical details to unpack, but there's a simple application that doesn't require unpacking them, namely the detection of problems in early reading (decoding problems, word knowledge problems, problems in phrase understanding) or similar problems in reading by language learners.
Rick Rubenstein said,
May 22, 2026 @ 5:19 pm
Sadly no existing, recordings of, the text by Christopher, Walken, or William, Shatner exist.