Rhythm Typology of Brazilian Portuguese dialects

This paper analyzes the speech rhythm of three Brazilian Portuguese dialects under the light of a coupled oscillator approach to rhythm typology. The data showed a scale from a less stress-timed to a more stressed-timed dialect as follows: Minas Gerais state (coupling strength = 1.83, speech rate = 6.3) > Sao Paulo state (1.66, 6.6) > Bahia state (1.26, 5.9) > Espirito Santo state (0.95, 4.8). Also, the results show that stress-timing seems to be associated to faster rates. Finally, the theoretical background used here, Barbosa's speech rhythm model, is capable of being sensible to linguistic variations such as speaking styles, speech rates, syntactic structures, and text knowledge.