Ahren Fitzroy & Mara Breen, Mount Holyoke College

Regular stress in music guides attention to important moments in a manner similar to that observed for word onsets during speech segmentation. Our overarching hypothesis is that metric structure in speech is useful for guiding children’s segmentation during early language learning. We investigated whether intensity variation in child-directed poetic speech signals metric structure similar to the way that it does in music. We modeled intensity variation in a corpus of productions of The Cat in the Hat (Dr. Seuss, 1957) using a metric accent model derived from music performance (Drake & Palmer, 1993). Using linear mixed-effects regression, we modeled the maximum intensity (dB) of each word as a function of metric strength. To isolate meter from linguistic properties known to affect intensity, we included control parameters for segment number, lexical frequency, repetition, word class, syntactic structure, and capitalization. Intensity increased with fewer phonemes, lower frequency, first mention, open class, syntactic boundary non-alignment, and capitalization. Consistent with the music performance model, metric structure further predicted word intensity: words aligned with beat one in a 6/8 metric structure (e.g., down in (A)*) were produced with the greatest intensity, and words aligned with beat four (e.g., fish) were produced with intensity less than beat one but greater than all others. Consistent with prior work showing intensity reduction for predictable speech, words aligned with beat four were reduced when they completed a couplet (fall). That speakers use intensity variation to signal metric structure is novel in the speech production literature, and demonstrates strong connections between hierarchical timing processes in speech and music.

Synthesized Cat In the Hat excerpt, normal order

Synthesized Cat In the Hat excerpt, random order