The misuse of speech rhythm components by undergraduate students

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.