This work investigates the rhythm of read speech as produced by Sora speakers in Assam. Sora is an Austro-Asiatic language and not much is known about the speech rhythm of these languages. Many of the Sora speakers in Assam are trilingual, as they speak Sora, Sadri and Assamese. While Assamese is the dominant language in the area, Sadri is a lingua-franca used by Sora speakers to communicate with speakers of other languages. In this work, we investigated the difference in rhythm when the speakers of Sora read Assamese, Sadri and Sora texts. Conventional rhythm measures, such as %V, nPVI, r-PVI, varco-V , varco-C, Delta-V and Delta-C are calculated for the read speech. The results showed that read Sora speech tends to be more mora-timed. However, when the same speakers read Assamese text, their rhythm properties are neither Assamese-like nor Sora-like. Similarly, the rhythm in the Sora speakers speaking Sadri also is very distinct and does not reflect any L1 influence.
Cite as: Horo, L., Sarmah, P. (2020) Rhythm in Sora Trilingual Readers. Proc. Speech Prosody 2020, 581-585, doi: 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2020-119
@inproceedings{horo20_speechprosody,
author={Luke Horo and Priyankoo Sarmah},
title={{Rhythm in Sora Trilingual Readers}},
year=2020,
booktitle={Proc. Speech Prosody 2020},
pages={581--585},
doi={10.21437/SpeechProsody.2020-119}
}