Does Isochrony (syllable-timed vs stress-timed) affect the difficulty of learning languages?

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Does Isochrony (syllable-timed vs stress-timed) affect the difficulty of learning languages?

Postby Hash » Thu Jul 15, 2021 4:16 pm

According to the renowned British phonetician, David Abercrombie, every language in the world is spoken with one kind of rhythm or with the other. French and Turkish are commonly quoted as examples of syllable-timed languages, while Russian and Arabic are said to be stress-timed.
There are also mora-timed languages such as Japanese or ancient Greek (and maybe Sanskrit?).
Which group do you think is easier to decipher when spoken? or does it depend on the classification of your native language, so if you speak a stress-timed language like English, it would be easier for you to understand other stress-timed languages such as German, Danish, or Persian?
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Re: Does Isochrony (syllable-timed vs stress-timed) affect the difficulty of learning languages?

Postby Kraut » Thu Jul 15, 2021 4:31 pm

French is difficult because it has "chaine parlee", the stress being at the end of an utterance of several words. So to make sense of this utterance you must know the meaning of the single elements to make out where a word might end and the next word begins
In a language like German you get glottal stop if the word begins with a vowel, thus you know where a new word begins.
An example:
Am.Abend.als.ein.alter.Opel.an.einer.Ecke.anhielt ... : the full stop represents glottal stop
A Frenchman who is not used to pronouncing glottal stops, reads the sentence in a row:
Amabendalseinalteropelaneinereckeanhielt
Last edited by Kraut on Thu Jul 15, 2021 11:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Does Isochrony (syllable-timed vs stress-timed) affect the difficulty of learning languages?

Postby Deinonysus » Thu Jul 15, 2021 4:41 pm

I have always thought that German felt more comfortable for me to speak than French or Spanish (which are syllable timed), and I always chalked that up to German being a West Germanic language like English, but now that you mention it, Arabic also feels quite comfortable despite it being completely unrelated to English and having a lot of different sounds, so maybe isochrony plays a bigger role than I realized.
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Re: Does Isochrony (syllable-timed vs stress-timed) affect the difficulty of learning languages?

Postby Querneus » Thu Jul 15, 2021 4:56 pm

I don't feel it affects learning much... At least not much more than all the other differences in pronunciation languages can have, like whether they have enchainment (as Kraut said of French, and which Spanish and English also have), or tone, etc.
Kraut wrote:French is difficult because it has "chaine parlee", the stress being at the end of an utterance of several words. So to make sense of this utterance you must know the meaning of the single elements to make out where a word might end and the next word begins
In a language like German you get glottal stop if the word begins with a vowel, thus you know where a new word begins.
An example:
Am.Abend.als.ein.alter.Opel.an.einer.Ecke.anhielt ... : the full stop represents glottal stop
A Frenchman who is not used to pronounce glottal stops, reads the sentence in a row:
Amabendalseinalteropelaneinereckeanhielt

In theory, you could have a syllable-timed language that always adds a glottal stop at the beginning of words that start with a vowel though. Kind of a different topic...

Interestingly, I rarely hear people complaining about Spanish or English enchainment. Maybe it's because Spanish and English stress words within groups more clearly? So that Ese año la almohada empecé a sentirla peor que antes sounds like Eseáño lalmoháda empecéasentírlapeórqueántes. Or for an English example, Whátanevéntfulsurpríse (there's no glottal stop before "an" or "eventful", unless you're enunciating extra-clearly).
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Re: Does Isochrony (syllable-timed vs stress-timed) affect the difficulty of learning languages?

Postby Dragon27 » Thu Jul 15, 2021 6:11 pm

In German you get a glottal stop at the beginning of a syllable that starts with a vowel, not just a word, so the glottal stop is not a 100% reliable marker of a new word. Plus, in a more relaxed speech many of the glottal stops (especially in unstressed syllables) shamelessly disappear. According to Canepari, glottal stops also don't normally appear in postverbal pronouns like in:
"Ich weiß es" /ɪç'vaɪ̯sɛs/
In addition to that, German is replete with numerous contractions, which greatly complicate listening comprehension.

In my opinion, listening comprehension is hard, no matter the language, when it comes to actual every-day speech, that you hear from native freely communicating with each other instead of catering to the foreigners, in movies and TV shows, etc. People don't enunciate, talk fast, butcher words, use all sort of contractions. If you think that some feature of the language's phonology makes it easier to comprehend, the language will find other ways to compensate for that.

Learn the language phonetics, listen a lot (and pay attention to what you listen), improve your language ability in other ways (i.e. reading) and eventually you'll get it.
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Re: Does Isochrony (syllable-timed vs stress-timed) affect the difficulty of learning languages?

Postby Kraut » Thu Jul 15, 2021 6:27 pm

This is me reading a Spanish text. It's clear that I have too many glottal stops that I carry from my German into Spanish when I try to articulate correctly. It gives me a foreign accent.
https://vocaroo.com/16A0tsmotbm2
---------
Very nasty, from my dialect: "Hense desscho gsäə?" meaning "Haben Sie das schon gesehen?"
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Re: Does Isochrony (syllable-timed vs stress-timed) affect the difficulty of learning languages?

Postby garyb » Thu Jul 15, 2021 6:28 pm

I don't think it makes a big difference for comprehension. The French "chaîne parlée" (thanks Kraut, I didn't know the correct term, I just called it syllable groups!) complicates things mainly because French doesn't have lexical stress, so several words are often grouped together and pronounced as if they were one word with a single stress at the end. Spanish and Italian are also syllable-timed but most words have their own stress so it's easier to separate them out when listening, even if you don't recognise every word.

As an English speaker I've really struggled to get the pronunciation right for syllable-timed languages with lexical stress (again Italian and Spanish) because my instinct is to pronounce them in a stress-timed way, making the stressed syllables longer and shortening the others (and maybe even reducing their vowels). It took me some practice to get the hang of giving every syllable its appropriate length but still putting an accent on the stressed ones, and I'm probably still not great at it. I can only imagine it's even harder the other way round, for a native speaker of a syllable-timed language to get used to stress-timing. French on the other hand was easier (at least once I became aware of the whole stress vs. syllable-timing distinction, which was a good few years into my studies - most resources and teachers don't consider this very crucial aspect to be worth mentioning!) because the lack of word stress made it easier to speak the syllables with the "mechanical" consistent rhythm.
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Re: Does Isochrony (syllable-timed vs stress-timed) affect the difficulty of learning languages?

Postby smallwhite » Thu Jul 15, 2021 6:35 pm

Italian = very easy
Spanish = very hard
for me so syllable-timedness is probably irrelevant.

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Re: Does Isochrony (syllable-timed vs stress-timed) affect the difficulty of learning languages?

Postby Hash » Fri Jul 16, 2021 10:05 pm

smallwhite wrote:Italian = very easy
Spanish = very hard
for me so syllable-timedness is probably irrelevant.


Italian is generally classified as syllable-timed, however, its vowel length can vary and it has geminate consonants, which are features that are not found in most of the other languages classified as syllable-timed (like Spanish which has no long vowels at all.) It is similar to some mora-timed languages, like Japanese, where vowels have different lengths and geminate consonants exist.
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