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  • 23 - Time, Cohesion, Style: Rhythm Formants in Oral Narrative

  • from Section 4 - Diversity of Rhythm from Oral Speech to Music
  • Edited by Lars Meyer, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Antje Strauss, University of Konstanz
  • Book:
    Rhythms of Speech and Language
    Published online:
    23 April 2026
    Print publication:
    07 May 2026, pp 405-427
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  • Summary

    After a discussion of factors of time, cohesion, style and rhythm formants in the context of speech registers, a brief appraisal of relevant approaches to the rhythms of natural speech is provided and exploratory case studies of oral narrative registers are conducted using a novel speech modulation theoretic framework, rhythm formant theory (RFT), and its associated methodology of rhythm formant analysis (RFA). The versatility of this framework is shown in applications to narrations of different types: toddler dialogue at an early stage in first-language acquisition, the narrative genre of African village communities, the fluency of reading aloud in English as a second language (L2), a comparison between newsreading and poetry reading in English, and a comparison of recitations of different Chinese poetry genres. Unlike earlier phonetic and phonological analyses of the "linguistic rhythm" of words and sentences, the novel analyses deal with natural real-time rhythms in recordings of authentic data that may be several minutes long, using utterance-long spectral analysis time windows.