Isochrony

Common card · No. 325164

Isochrony is a linguistic analysis or hypothesis assuming that any spoken language's utterances are divisible into equal rhythmic portions of some kind. Under this assumption, languages are proposed to broadly fall into one of two categories based on rhythm or timing: syllable-timed or stress-timed languages (or, in some analyses, a third category: mora-timed languages). In syllable-timing, every syllable takes up roughly equal time, while in stress-timing, there is roughly equal time between every stressed syllable. While isochrony may be a useful theoretical framework in some contexts, studies suggest that, at best, syllable structure in natural speech has only a somewhat regular rhythm and perfectly regular speech may in fact be less intelligible. Careful linguistic analysis instead reveals that isochrony may be a subjective feature of language: more a listener perception than an inherent part of a language, making it a difficult hypothesis to test. Empirical studies have been mixed...

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