MEASURING RHYTHM IN DIALECTS OF NEW BRUNSWICK FRENCH: IS THERE A ROLE FOR INTENSITY?

摘要

While dialect differences are often associated with lexical items and with the pronunciations of certain vowels and consonants, rhythmic features can also characterize regional varieties of a language. In recent years, researchers have developed metrics that describe rhythmic structure by measuring the variability in the durations of vocalic and consonantal intervals. These rhythm metrics have been used to classify languages into syllable-timed and stress-timed groups, to study rhythm in second language phonology and to classify speakers with dysarthrias. They have also been used to distinguish among the dialects of one language.