Cluster analysis of typological groups of language rhythm

This article aims to answer two questions: 1) whether the cluster analysis handy finding rhythm typological similarities, and it can be classified on the basis of it so far unanalysed languages 2) in which a cluster – stress-timed or syllable-timed languages – Lithuanian and Latvian languages fall into. Standard text, proposed by the International Phonetics Association (see http://alt-usageenglish.org/north_txt.html) (Eng. The North Wind and the Sun, Lith. Šiaurės vėjas ir saulė) was selected for this study. Five native speakers (Latvian, Lithuanian, Swedish, Icelandic and Chinese) translated and recorded it (each record was much shorter than 1 min.). The records were annotated by program PRAAT and acoustic correlates of rhythm of records that we have done have been calculated using program Correlator (2. 1 version) which was developed by Pado Mairano (2011) in Arturo Genre experimental phonetics laboratory of Turin (Italy). It was found that Lithuanian ΔC=52, %V=54, ΔV=54, varcoΔV=54, varcoΔC=66, nPVI=57, rPVI=57; Latvian ΔC=55, %V=52, ΔV=58, varcoΔV=55, varcoΔC=65, nPVI=70, rPVI=65; Swedish ΔC=65, %V=49, ΔV=51, varcoΔV=50, varcoΔC=66, nPVI=60, rPVI=82; Icelandic ΔC=52, %V=47, ΔV=41, varcoΔV=50, varcoΔC=60, nPVI=51, rPVI=56; Chinese ΔC=48, %V=62, ΔV=74, varcoΔV=51, varcoΔC=62, nPVI=51, rPVI=53. Data of other languages estimated by the author of the program Mairano (2011) was used for cluster analysis. The data was entered to the SPSS program and a cluster analysis was performed. The results show that the cluster analysis (both hierarchical and two-steps) does not provide unambiguous results. Hierarchical analysis is pretty handy to cluster less statistically processed variables (ΔV, ΔC, %V, partly varcoΔV, varcoΔC), a two-step analysis might be possible to rely on, and with more complex indices (PVI). [...]Humanitarinių mokslų fakultetasLituanistikos katedraVytauto Didžiojo universiteta