A linguistic Comparison: Stress-timed and syllable-timed languages and their impact on second language acquisition

Relevance 
Within the scope of this study, a comparison will be made between syllable-
timed languages and stress-timed languages, using Spanish and English as examples 
of each. To study the impact of rhythm, or timing, on second language acquisition a 
comparison will be made between the speaking rhythm of native speakers as well as 
non-native speakers. I hypothesize that second language acquisition is greatly 
impacted by the differences in rhythm between two languages. Therefore, in 

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comparing the stresses used by native speakers and non-native speakers, I expect to 
see that native Spanish speakers have a more consistent, even displacement while 
native English speakers will show more variation in their displacement, as they 
account for the many stresses in their rhythm. The changes in displacement 
represent the intensity of the sound. A greater, more changed displacement is 
indicative of a high degree of loudness. Since second language learners are not 
typically taught about the differences in stress-timing versus syllable-timing, I 
expect that speakers will not demonstrate a knowledge of the differences when 
speaking their second language.
Research Design 
This study uses human research subjects and their natural speaking 
capabilities to measure and study the nature of the stresses they use in language.
There were four participants, two native Spanish speakers and two native English 
speakers. This was a single-blind experiment because the subjects knew that the 
study had to do with their use of language, but were uninformed as to what was 
specifically being analyzed.
Subjects were asked to sit in a quiet room and wear headphones to avoid 
distractions or outside noise. Subjects were first asked a few questions about their 
learning styles and how they had learned to speak their second language. Each, at 
separate times, was then provided with the story, “Little Red Cap” (The text is 
included in Appendix A) and asked to read it when instructed to do so. The story 
was kept covered until the recording was started. The researcher asked the subject 
if he or she was ready and when he or she affirmed that he or she was, each was 

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asked to begin reading. The subject read a portion of the story. Then the recording 
was stopped and the researcher gave the subject a copy of “Caperucita roja,” the 
same story in Spanish (The text is included in Appendix B). The story was kept 
covered until the recording was started, at which time the subject was instructed to 
uncover the story and began reading. The subject read a portion of the story. After 
he or she finished, the recording was stopped and the study was finished. After 
recording all four subjects, the researcher used the phonetics software Praat to 
analyze the recordings. The recordings were compared syllable to syllable within 
each subject’s data in order to compare the intensity of the waveform between 
stressed and unstressed syllables. This analysis was documented and then used to 
compare the average intensities between the two languages. The spectrogram and 
results are recorded below.