engleski

Articulation rate and speech rate in monolingual and bilingual speech: a study on Croatian and Italian

There are only few studies that investigated rhythm in bilinguals. In a research on speech rhythm and rhythm metrics in bilinguals of German and Italian Schmidt and Dellwo (2012, 2013) calculated the articulation rate − AR (syllables/second, pauses excluded) and the speech rate - SR (syllables/second, pauses included) on a corpus of read speech. They found out that bilinguals exhibit intermediate values in both languages. In another research (Dellwo and Schmid 2015) it has been established that (i) AR and SR are language-dependent and (ii) that speakers have different ways to control the articulators. Building up on previous studies on speech rhythm (Giannini 2005, Schmid and Dellwo 2015), in the present research I calculated the AR, the SR and the duration of pauses in simultaneous bilinguals of Croatian and Italian. The test subjects were divided into 3 groups of speakers: 1) monolingual Italians (Veneto) ; 2) monolingual Croatians (Istria) and 3) bilinguals of Croatian and Italian (Istria). Each group consisted of 10 speakers. All the speakers were female and had the same level of education (EQF level 6). The aim of the study was the following: (i) to compare the AR and SR in Italian to the AR and SR in Croatian ; (ii) to understand which values the bilinguals exhibit in both languages (i.e. if AR and SR of the bilinguals are different from those of the two monolingual groups and if so, how they are different). The subjects were recorded performing a reading task. The material was segmented manually into 3 Praat-tiers: 1) syllables ; 2) pauses and 3) total duration of the reading. Finally, a Praat script calculated the AR and SR indices. The data obtained was tested with the one-way ANOVA statistical test and the post-hoc Tukey HSD. The results showed that 1) AR, SR and pauses are language-specific (there is a statistically significant difference between Croatian and Italian monolinguals), which confirms that they are language- dependent ; 2) there are inter-individual differences ; 3) the bilinguals read slower in both the languages with respect to the two groups of monolinguals.

bilingual speech, articulation rate, speech rate

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