Syllable duration

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The syllable duration (sometimes as syllable length called) is the time it takes for a speaker to one syllable utterance. It is measured in milliseconds .

The syllable duration depends on several factors:

  • on the number and type of sounds that make up the syllable, and their duration ;
  • the pace of speech that the speaker takes;
  • of the environment in which the syllable occurs.

Environment here means the fact that a syllable is part of a speech act or word. A principle that has been recognized for a long time applies here: A certain syllable is spoken the shorter the more syllables there are in the word in which it occurs. This relationship is known today as one of the forms of Menzerath's law in quantitative linguistics .

The frequency distribution of the syllable duration in the language corpus follows the law of the distribution of syllable lengths and largely corresponds to the distribution of word lengths .

See also

literature

  • Gabriel Altmann , Michael Schwibbe : The Menzerath law in information processing systems. With contributions by Werner Kaumanns, Reinhard Köhler and Joachim Wilde. Olms, Hildesheim, Zurich, New York 1989, ISBN 3-487-09144-5 , pp. 60-62.
  • S. Geršić, Gabriel Altmann: Sound - syllable - word and Menzerath's law. In: Frankfurter Phonetic Contributions 3, 1980, pp. 115–123.
  • Paul Menzerath, JM de Oleza: Spanish sound duration. An experimental study. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / Leipzig 1928, p. 71f.
  • Eduard Sievers : Basics of Phonetics as an introduction to the study of phonetics in the Indo-European languages. 4th, improved edition. Breitkopf & Härtel, Leipzig 1893, p. 240.

Web links

Wiktionary: syllable duration  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Data on the dependence of the syllable duration in three speaking styles and the syllable length on the number of syllables of the words in German and partly in Italian can be found in: Laila Asleh, Karl-Heinz Best : To review the Menzerath-Altmann law using the example of German (and Italian) Words. In: Göttingen Contributions to Linguistics 10/11, 2004/5, pp. 9–19; Syllable duration pp. 15-17.