engleski

Developmental changes in speech rhythm. A study on Italian L2

In recent years new algorythms called rhythm metrics have been developed (e.g. Ramus et al. 1999, Grabe and Low 2002, Dellwo 2006, White & Mattys 2007, etc.) in order to measure speech rhythm and attempt to distinguish languages between the traditional rhythm classes: ‘stress- timed’ and ‘syllable- timed’. The main differences between the traditional measures and the metrics is that the former were based on the duration and standard deviations of syllables and inter-stress units, while the latter are based on the duration of vocalic (V) and consonantal (C) intervals. Although this new approach has been extensively used to analyze the rhythm of natural languages, studies on L2 rhythm and bilingual rhythm are still rare. Even fewer studies focused on changes in timing patterns that occur in second language (L2) acquisition. The aim of the present study is to analyze developmental changes in speech rhythm in Italian L2 produced by Croatian speakers with different levels of proficiency in Italian. The hypothesis is that rhythm (in particular the speaking rate) changes as acquisition progresses, which has already been found out by Ordin and Polyanskaya (2015). In order to test this hypothesis, I will conduct an experiment featuring 8 Croatian speakers from Istria of Italian L2 at the beginner level (A2), 8 at the intermediate level (B2) and 8 at the advanced level (C2). The results will be compared with a control group of monolingual Italians from Veneto and Istrian Italo-Croatian bilinguals from Istria (Matticchio 2017). All the participants will be female (age 18-26) and will be recorded performing a reading task (The boy who cried wolf) in Italian and Croatian. After the segmentation of the material with Praat (Boerma & Weenink 2016) a series of prosodic indexes rhythm (e.g. articulation rate [AR] and speech rate [SR]) and rhythm metrics will be applied to the corpus (those suggested by Ramus et al. 1999, Grabe & Low 2002, Dellwo 2006, White & Mattys 2007) and calculated with Correlatore (Mairano 2014). I expect that the results will confirm that L2 competency in rhythm progresses along with proficiency in the target language. Further experiments will have to show whether L2 learners may reach native-like levels and whether the rythhmic-typological properties of both the target language and the native language have an impact on the speed of acquisition. An adequate description of L2 Italian rhythm will allow teachers to address the common problems of rhythm acquisition in non-native speakers, which has been shown to be critical in intelligible communication (cf. amongst others Derwing et al. 1998, Espinosa 2016).

speech rhythm, Croatian, Italian L2

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