We present the first quantitative analysis of rhythm in Slovak, using two speech corpora designed to exhibit rich prosodic variability including extreme variation in speaking rate and articulatory precision. Several standard consonant and vocalic interval measures show a close similarity of Slovak rhythmic structure with languages traditionally considered syllabletimed, but suggest counter-intuitive dissimilarities with closely related Czech. Additionally, our data highlight strong dependency of these measures on speech material, speaker and tempo. Overall, our results shed further doubt on the usefulness of CV interval measures in speech rhythm research.

Index Terms: speech tempo, rhythm, Slovak