Mora-timed, stress-timed, and syllable-timed rhythm classes: Clues in English speech production by bilingual speakers

Abstract

A growing body of literature suggests that the world's languages can be classified into three rhythm classes: mora-timed languages, stress-timed languages, and syllable-timed languages. However, scholars cannot agree on which rhythmic measures discriminate rhythm classes most satisfactorily and whether the speech rate factor should be considered. In this study, we analyze speech production by bilingual speakers, and compare their production with that of monolingual speakers and ESL speakers. Our rhythmic metric measure results show that when speech rate is taken into consideration, a combination of the two metric measures for vowels, Varco∆V and vocalic nPVI, is most reliable in discriminating different rhythm classes, while consonants do not seem effective, whether the speech rate factor is included or not.