Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 14

Linguistic rhythmic or timing categories, usually defined in terms of isochrony, remain controversial as a meaningful typology for classifying languages, despite decades of research. Romance languages offer an opportunity to address this question since closely related languages are proposed to be at different ends of the typology. We test two such languages: European Spanish (ES) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP). Instead of investigating isochrony per se , however, we examine the interface between