ACQUIRING RHYTHMICALLY DIFFERENT LANGUAGES IN A BILINGUAL CONTEXT

Abstract

Using the Pairwise Variability Index (Grabe & Low, 2002), the rhythmic patterns of 3;0 year old German and Spanish monolingual and bilingual children are examined. Whereas the PVIs of monolingual Spanish data are low and those of monolingual German data are high, the data of the bilinguals do not greatly differ across languages. The PVIs of the bilinguals in German do not differ from those of the monolinguals, but the consonantal intervals of the bilinguals in Spanish are characterized by higher variability than those of the Spanish monolinguals. Several explanatory hypotheses are discussed, and an interpretation, which posits that consonantal intervals reflect properties of the language-specific phonology, is proposed. This implies that only the vocalic PVIs correlate with rhythmic class.