A Comparative Analysis of Prosodic Rhythms in Multilingual Speakers: Phonological Encoding and Perception Across Language Families

Project Abstract

This study investigates how prosodic rhythms are encoded and perceived by multilingual speakers across language families, integrating phonological theory with experimental phonetics and perception data. Building on theories of rhythm class, metrical structure, and syllable-tyller timing, the research examines whether speakers acquire language-specific prosodic templates that influence rhythmical production and perceptual salience in cross-linguistic contexts. We combine corpus-based analyses of spontaneous speech with controlled production tasks and perceptual experiments to assess rhythm metrics such as %V, PVI, and speech tempo across languages with distinct rhythmic classifications (stress-timed, syllable-timed, and mora-timed). The project further investigates phonological encoding mechanisms by comparing abstract prosodic representations (e.g., phonological phrasing, intonational contours, and boundary cues) across bilingual and multilingual speakers, and how language dominance, age of acquisition, and lexical stress patterns modulate rhythmic realization. A novel cross-language synthetic voice and tempo-matching paradigm is employed to examine perceptual quotients for rhythm discrimination, tempo congruence, and boundary signaling, while controlling for speech rate and frequency effects. We hypothesize that multilinguals display flexible prosodic repertoires, wherein cross-language transfer leads to intermediate rhythmic profiles and context-dependent cue weighting during perception. The methodology includes mixed-methods approaches (i) quantitative corpus analyses of large-scale multilingual speech data to extract prosodic features; (ii) phonetic experiments measuring timing, energy, and spectral cues; (iii) perception experiments using adaptive-trial and forced-choice tasks to quantify rhythm congruence judgments; (iv) neurocognitive measures to explore processing efficiency and cross-language interference; and (v) cross-cultural comparisons to assess sociolinguistic influences on rhythm choice. Data will be analyzed with multilevel modeling to parse within- and between-speaker variation, and Bayesian information criteria will guide model selection for rhythm classification and perception accuracy. The anticipated findings include (a) evidence for cross-linguistic influence in prosodic choice among multilinguals, with measurable shifts in tempo, vowel duration, and boundary signaling; (b) differential perceptual weighting of prosodic cues depending on language pairings and proficiency; (c) robust correlations between rhythm metrics and intelligibility in noisy environments; and (d) insights into how prosodic encoding interacts with syntactic and semantic processing in multilingual contexts. The study aims to contribute to theoretical models of rhythm in language, inform language teaching and assessment practices by highlighting perceptual cues most salient across language families, and offer practical guidelines for speech technologies to better accommodate multilingual speech in naturalistic settings.

Project Overview

What This Project Is About

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This project looks at how people who speak more than one language use rhythm in speech—like speed, timing, and stress patterns—to convey meaning. It compares how different language families encode these rhythms and how listeners perceive them in multilingual speech.

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The Problem It Addresses

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Objectives of the Project

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1. Describe basic rhythm patterns in a selection of languages from different families.
2. Compare how multilingual speakers produce these rhythms across languages.
3. Explore how listeners identify language or meaning from prosody in mixed-language speech.
4. Assess whether exposure to multiple languages changes perception of rhythm.

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What You Will Do Step by Step

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1. Review simple literature on rhythm in speech and prosody.
2. Collect short speech samples from multilingual participants across language families.
3. Annotate rhythms using easy-to-understand timing measures (e.g., syllable duration, stress timing).
4. Run basic comparisons to see how rhythms align with each language’s norms.
5. Conduct small listener checks to see how prosody affects perception.
6. Summarize findings and reflect on limitations.

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Expected Outcome