Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. Vol. 1. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 24)

Richard Cauldwell: Stress-timing: observations, beliefs, and evidence

So although (cf. section 4 below) stress-timing and syllable-timing were viewed as a binary distinction, there has been relatively little interest from scholars who speak the syllable-timed languages. 3 Three everyday observations The stress-timing hypothesis arose and is perpetuated because of the common observation that languages sound rhythmically different: for example, language learners who have English as a mother tongue report that the units of French speech (segments, syllables, tone units) have a different relationship to time. Another observation is that it is normal to speak nursery-rhymes in English in such a way that stresses do occur at equal time intervals. The third observation is one often made by teachers who have found that practice of short stretches of language with stress-timing (cf. Underhill, 1994) can improve students' fluency in speaking. These observations have led to the transformation of the stresstiming hypothesis into the belief that English is, underlyingly, stresstimed. Meanwhile, the fact that stress-timing is part of a binary distinction - it is twinned with syllable-timing - has been conveniently ignored. The schizophrenia has arisen because these everyday observations conflict with the findings of research: research into stress-timing, whether it has focused on the speaker, the sound signal, or the hearer, has failed to provide the desired 'proof or validation of the hypothesis. In fact it seems quite reasonable to take the view that the research has falsified the stress-timing hypothesis, and that it should have been abandoned a long time ago. But the force of the three observations mentioned above (and the lack of an alternative explanation for them) has been so great that researchers have refused to acknowledge this falsification. This is despite the number of papers (e.g. Dauer, 1983) which have argued strongly against stress-timing. It might be argued that this is a low level schizophrenia with which we have been comfortable for some time, and that it is not really a problem. I would argue that on the contrary it is a problem for two reasons. First, it is intellectually irresponsible to allow a contradiction to exist between experimental evidence and hypothesis. Second, there are practical consequences: if we do not seek to resolve the conflict between hypothesis and experimental evidence 36