The Effects of Syntactic Dependencies and Speech Tempo on Macro-Rhythm

Macro-rhythm is a parameter that distinguishes the prosodic profiles of languages at the intonational level. However, no conclusive quantification of macro-rhythm differences between languages has been proposed and there are to date no dedicated studies investigating the regularity and variability of macro-rhythm within a single language. This study experimentally examines the global tonal patterns of Swiss German to test (i) internal effects related to word order and (ii) articulation rate effects on global tonal patterns. We find that macro-rhythm is affected by language-internal syntactic variation and by intra-speaker variability (in terms of speech tempo).