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Quantifying Rhythmic Differences Between Spanish, English, & Hispanic English, Phillip Carter

Phillip M. Carter

The present analysis examines the Spanish and English of adolescent bilinguals (L1 Spanish, L2 English) from an exclusively Hispanic neighborhood in Raleigh, North Carolina. Conversational speech was analyzed for prosodic rhythm using the Pairwise Variability Index (Low & Grabe 1995), which included for each speaker at least 200 syllable-to- syllable comparisons in each language in order to determine the actual quantitative differences between Spanish and English. Additionally, the English data were compared to the data in the Thomas and Carter (2003 a, b) corpus in order to determine the rhythmic differences between North Carolina Hispanics and the benchmark non-Spanish-speaking, native …