Speech Rhythm in English and Italian: an Experimental Study on Early Sequential Bilingualism

Abstract

The study investigates the dynamics of speech rhythm in early sequential bilingual children who have access to Italian-English immersion programs. The research focused on the Italian and English semi-spontaneous narrative productions of 9 students, aged between 6;7 and 10;11 and distributed across three different classes (Year 1, Year 3, Year 5). Their speech was recorded and subject to an interval-based analysis via computation of %V/ΔC, PVI and Varco metrics. The retrieved metrics underwent within-group and between-group one-way ANOVAs in order to identify valuable cross-linguistic variations among children of the same age and statistically significant differences between different age groups (Y1, Y3, Y5). The results appear to support a stress-centered interpretation of speech rhythm: according to this view, all languages could be arranged on a stress-timed continuum in which “syllable-timing” is marked by sparser occurrences of (regular) prominence due to the relative absence of vocalic elision and consonantal complexity. Indeed, the comparative analysis drawn between the normalized vocalic indexes of Y1, Y3 and Y5 students revealed a statistically relevant increase in vocalic variation phenomena both in Italian and in English. Moreover, Y1 and Y3 consonantal scores were comparatively higher in the Italian sample: it will be discussed how unpredictable stress-timed patterns can arise as a function of proficiency, speech-rate and age-related disfluencies.