On the relevance of speech rhythm metrics to characterize social factors

Previous work on rhythm in speech signal has attempted to quantify rhythm metrics and classify languages accordingly into different rhythm classes. These attempts have met with more or less success; new studies conducted on some varieties and regional dialects provide results that are not consistent with their corresponding rhythm class languages. In this work, we try to explain previous results by investigating to what extent rhythm metrics are conditioned by social factors such as differences in age, gender, region, and education level. Experiments conducted on two sentences of the TIMIT database spoken by 630 speakers show that rhythm metrics are highly sensitive to the first three above-mentioned factors.