Abstract:
The nature of speech rhythm classes has been a matter of a lot of debate as to whether it
should be conceived as a discrete stress-timed vs. syllable-timed dichotomy or as a
continuum. According to the new account of speech rhythm, the fact that Algerian Arabic and
English belong to the same rhythmic class does not necessarily mean that Algerian learners of
English as a foreign language will produce the correct rhythmic patterns of English. The
production of the latter is rather related to their interlanguage which is affected by the
previously known linguistic systems’ phonology. The present research sets out to classify the
rhythm of the interlanguage produced by third year Algerian EFL students at Mentouri
University as well as to investigate the role of interference in the shaping of this interlanguage
speech rhythm. Accordingly, we hypothesised that the features of speech rhythm components
produced by the informants would be affected by interference from the previously known
linguistic systems i.e. Algerian Arabic, standard Arabic and French. We also hypothesised
that the resulting interlanguage speech rhythm would be a hybrid of stress-timed and syllabletimed speech rhythms. An error analysis of the informants’ production of vowel reduction,
syllable structure and stress is conducted in order to verify the first hypothesis. As for the
second hypothesis, a corpus of the informants’ recordings is acoustically analysed by means
of the universal speech analysis software, Praat, in order to eventually measure the rhythm
metrics %V and ∆C. The findings obtained confirm both hypotheses. The informants’
rhythmic patterns are mostly affected by their first foreign language, French, and to a great
extent by spelling pronunciation. The metrics measured in this study i.e. %V and ∆C, yield
that the informants’ speech rhythm is rather intermediate, merging a stress-timed ∆C and a
syllable-timed %V. Following the findings obtained, a syllabus for teaching the different
aspects of speech rhythm at the word and sentence level in both modules, ‘Phonetics’ and
‘Oral Expression and Listening Comprehension’, is suggested.
