Abstract

The failure to document isochronous interstress intervals in spoken English may be attributed to the unconstrained nature of most experimental tasks. Some experiments are described which probe the degree to which the relative durations of interstress intervals within a series of repeated phrases are independent. The experiments introduce a novel paradigm, `speech cycling', for investigating temporal phenomena in speech. The data reveal the presence of strong rhythmic constraints on stress timing which have hitherto eluded experimenters. It is argued that these constraints are evidence for a task-specific dynamical system in which prominent events (stress beats) are constrained to occur at specific, predictable, phases of an enclosing cycle. The dynamical system is characterized by entrainment between metrical levels, a principle which underlies rhythmic coordination in activities such as locomotion. 1 Introduction Numerous phoneticians have suggested that English speech tends to exh...

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