DEFINITION OF A LITTLE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF PHONETICS

 

                                                                  

   Rhythm

 

Speech is perceived as a sequence of events in time, and the word rhythm is used torefer to the way events are distributed in time. Obvious examples of vocal rhythms arechanting as part of games (for example, children calling words while skipping, or football crowds calling their team’s name) or in connection with work (e.g. sailors’chants used to synchronise the pulling on an anchor rope). In conversational speechthe rhythms are vastly more complicated, but it is clear that the timing of speech is notrandom. An extreme view (though a quite common one) is that English speech has arhythm that allows us to divide it up into more or less equal intervals of time calledfeet, each of which begins with a stressed syllable: this is called thestress-timed  rhythm hypothesis. Languages where the length of each syllable remains more or lessthe same as that of its neighbours whether or not it is stressed are calledsyllable-timed. Most evidence from the study of real speech suggests that such rhythms onlyexist in very careful, controlled speaking, but it appears from psychological researchthat listeners’ brains tend to hear timing regularities even where there is little or no physical regularity.