Acquiring Rhythm: A Comparison of L1 and L2 Speakers of Canadian English and Japanese

Lacking knowledge of either language, one can readily distinguish Spanish and German speech, but distinguishing Italian and Spanish is more difficult. One reason that certain pairs of languages sound distinct is that they have different rhythms. The rhythmic contrast between, for example, Spanish and German arises in part from durational differences between stressed and unstressed vowels, and from the complexity of permissible syllable structures (Dauer, 1983). In German or English, for instance, the alternation between long, stressed vowels and short, reduced vowels is said to create a percept of a contrastive or “Morse code ” rhythm (Lloyd James, 1940). Conversely, the much lower degree of stress-related lengthening, the relative attenuation of vowel reduction in unstressed syllables, and the lower frequency of complex consonant clusters in Spanish contribute to the impression of a more regular or “machine gun ” rhythmic pattern, at least to speakers of English or German. Based on these observations, a number of acoustic metrics for speech rhythm have been proposed (e.g. Dellwo & Wagner, 2003; Grabe & Low, 2002