Descriptive and Comparative Study of Rhythm in Chilean Spanish Read-Aloud Speech

This article presents a descriptive study whose purpose is to determine whether rhythm in read-aloud speech from professionals of eight different Chilean cities matches the traditional classification given to Spanish as a syllable-timed language, grouping which is also normally extended to all Romance languages. Several studies have stated that Spanish is a language whose rhythmic patterns can be characterized as syllable-timed, however, other studies, both old and recent, have stated that Spanish has rhythm patterns closer to stress-timed languages. Up to date, no studies have investigated this aspect of rhythm in Chilean Spanish. In this study, a corpus of read-aloud speech from 30 participants from different geographical areas in Chile is analysed. The analysis was conducted after obtaining quantitative metrics, developed recently in other studies, in order to give more precision and objectivity to the methods. Results show that Chilean Spanish is syllable-timed, although it displays values slightly closer to stress-timed languages than peninsular Spanish. As to the effect of the geographic origin of the subjects, the differences observed were relatively small, which suggests that this type of variation is not of importance in Chilean Spanish rhythm, in read-aloud speech.