A comparative study on the production of inter-stress intervals of English speech by English native speakers and Korean speakers

This study attempts to compare the Inter-Stress Interval (ISI) patterns of English between the native speakers of English and Korean. One of the invariable results of the experiments about English speech rhythm has been that the strict concept of isochronism did not seem to exist at least in the surface phonetic level. However, the remarkable difference shown from the production experiment of the present study suggests that distinction in language rhythms, especially between English and Korean, be apparent. While the English native speakers and the proficient Korean speakers of English consistently produce rather shorter increase in ISI duration as the number of unstressed syllables located between target stressed syllables increased, the non-proficient Korean speakers of English produce a little longer one. The position of an ISI in a sentence does not seem at the moment to affect critically the duration of the ISI.