Special Sessions

Timing and Rhythm Across LAnguages (TRALA)

Organizers:

Kathryn Franich (University of Delaware)

Tamara Rathcke (University of Konstanz)

There has been considerable interest and debate over the last several decades as to the notion of speech ‘rhythm’: is speech rhythmic, and if so, in what way? Recent work has advanced this line of inquiry by probing rhythmicity from a variety of perspectives. Despite these advances, the vast majority of research on rhythm has been limited to languages within the Indo-European family, which, despite considerable internal variation, share many aspects of their prosodic structure. A clear path forward in understanding the rhythmic nature of speech and language is to investigate these aspects of rhythmicity in a broader typological array of languages. To that end, this special session will invite contributions on speech rhythm (from any perspective) which draw on data from less-studied languages, and in particular, those outside of the Indo-European family. The session will help to bring additional research to bear on questions of how speech rhythm should be understood, and how it should be studied in languages in which prosodic structure and prominence may be differently organized and encoded.