Cross‐linguistic differences in prosodic organization: Evidence from a repetition task.

Abstract

The prosody of languages such as English and Spanish has been characterized as exhibiting different rhythmic organizations. English has been hypothesized to organize syllables into feet, with one stressed syllable per foot. Spanish is among the languages whose prosody has been hypothesized to not include the foot, despite the existence of lexical stress in Spanish. We tested the hypothesis that these potential differences in organization would lead to systematically different responses when speakers were asked to entrain a sequence of syllables with a metronome at an increasing rate, and that L1Spanish/L2English speakers would continue to exhibit the Spanish pattern in their English. Speakers of all three types were recorded producing a single repeated syllable, or a sequence of two alternating syllables, in time with a metronome, whose rate increased monotonically after a stabilization period. At slower speech rates, English speakers produced each word as a separate foot with a corresponding pitch accent, while at increased speech rates, two words were grouped together into a single iambic foot with one pitch accent. Spanish speakers and L1Spanish/L2English speakers are expected to shorten both vowels, employing a symmetric strategy (as opposed to the asymmetric strategy of English speakers) to keep pace with the metronome. [Work supported by NIH, NSF.]