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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 25, No. 0, pp.894-911
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2025
Received 13 May 2025 Revised 10 Jun 2025 Accepted 17 Jun 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.25..202506.894

An Envelope-Based Analysis of Utterance Rhythmicity in Korean-English Bilinguals

Seung-Eun Kim
Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Linguistics, Northwestern University 2016 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208, USA seungeun.kim@northwestern.edu


© 2025 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This study investigated rhythmicity in the speech of Korean-English bilinguals and English monolinguals, utilizing envelope-based rhythm metrics. Unlike most previous studies that analyzed consonantal and vocalic intervals to study rhythm, this study examined the stability of syllabic- and stress-related oscillations derived from the amplitude envelope of filtered speech. The rhythm metrics were obtained from short and simple Korean and English sentences, and the average metrics calculated for each speaker and language were analyzed. The results found a significant difference in foot-level rhythmicity between L1 Korean and L1 English: specifically, L1 English speakers were in general more rhythmic at the foot-level than L1 Korean speakers. In addition, L2 English exhibited an intermediate rhythmic pattern, which was not significantly different from either L1 Korean or L1 English. Analysis of L1 and L2 rhythmicity within bilinguals found a correlation between the two measures, suggesting that the bilingual’s L1 rhythmicity predicts their L2 rhythmicity at the foot-level. Analyses of the syllable-level rhythmic metric did not exhibit systematic patterns in all comparisons. Overall, this study adopted relatively underexplored metrics to characterize rhythm in L1 and L2 speech, highlighting the need for their broader application across diverse speaker groups and speech materials.

Keywords:

speech production, second-language speech, rhythmicity, amplitude envelope, syllable-level oscillations, stress-related oscillations, Korean-English bilinguals

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