PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

This contribution combines functional, structural and acoustic explanations of a domain "beyond words": how speech rhythm provides narrative cohesion and group bonding by caller entrainment with a choir during an orature event, recorded during fieldwork, in Ega, an endangered language isolate in south central Ivory Coast. The event in question is an oral narrative, a parable related in an interactive scenario by the village orator in two roles: as narrator, with feedback from his designated responder, and as caller in chanted interaction with the audience. First, a qualitative characterisation of coupling functions of speech rhythms is given, continued with a cyclical dynamic interaction model with specific rhythmical properties. The qualitative analyses are followed by a phonetic analysis based on annotation mining as a bridge leading to the quantitative signal processing of rhythm formants, and back to a qualitative interpretation of frequency properties of spectral peaks as resonant rhythm formants. While previous approaches have either selected functional or structural or acoustic analyses and representations of rhythm, the present study shows how these three approaches, taken together, can cohere and explain how speech rhythm patterns can be both physically grounded and functionally interpreted in context.