On the syllable-timing of Cantonese and Beijing Mandarin

This study investigates the speech rhythm of Cantonese and Beijing Mandarin using some recently developed acoustic rhythmic measures. The two languages were compared with four languages in the BonnTempo corpus: German and English (stress-timed) and French and Italian (syllable-timed). Six Cantonese and six Beijing Mandarin native speakers were recorded reading the North Wind and the Sun story with a normal speech rate and telling the story semi-spontaneously. Both raw and normalised rhythmic measures were calculated using vocalic, consonantal and syllabic durations (∆C, ∆V