Emily Nava

Modeling prosodic rhythm: Evidence from second language speech.

The global prosodic structure of languages has been described using the typological dichotomy of stress‐timed versus syllable‐timed. Various indices have been successfully employed in literature for quantifying these classifications, one of which is the duration ratio between the total voiceless and total voiced stretches in the signal. It has been further shown that various language‐specific characteristics, such as syllable‐structure phonotactics and stress‐sensitive lengthening and shortening, can contribute to this difference. To reveal the interaction of these components, acoustic data from running speech of L1 Spanish/L2 English and native English speakers were analyzed. Total ratio of voiceless‐to‐voiced durations discriminated L1 Spanish (lower) and L1 English (higher); L2 speakers showed ratios in between the two, with higher proficiency L2 speakers showing ratios closer to L1 English. A task dynamic application, a speech planning and production model [Nam et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 115, 2430 (2...

Cross‐linguistic differences in prosodic organization: Evidence from a repetition task.

The prosody of languages such as English and Spanish has been characterized as exhibiting different rhythmic organizations. English has been hypothesized to organize syllables into feet, with one stressed syllable per foot. Spanish is among the languages whose prosody has been hypothesized to not include the foot, despite the existence of lexical stress in Spanish. We tested the hypothesis that these potential differences in organization would lead to systematically different responses when speakers were asked to entrain a sequence of syllables with a metronome at an increasing rate, and that L1Spanish/L2English speakers would continue to exhibit the Spanish pattern in their English. Speakers of all three types were recorded producing a single repeated syllable, or a sequence of two alternating syllables, in time with a metronome, whose rate increased monotonically after a stabilization period. At slower speech rates, English speakers produced each word as a separate foot with a corresponding pitch accent...