Chinese and Italian speech rhythm. Normalization and the CCI algorithm

This paper re-examines the speech rhythm of Beijing Chinese and Pisa Italian by means of the Control/Compensation Index (CCI), with a view to normalizing the speech data, in order to reduce the effect of the rate factor. Two metrics were applied: (a) (D)nCCI, an adaptation to the CCI model of the nPVI normalization strategy; (b) (s)nCCI, a z-score normalization, which takes into account the actual constitution of each V- and C-interval, by referring the individual segment's duration to the mean duration of the members of the corresponding natural phoneme class. The results indicate the advantage of the snCCI metrics as a normalization strategy.