Don't Skim Over Text: From Rhythm to Meaning Part II

Simon Ager of Omniglot, a second (third, forth, & fifth) language acquisition and linguistics blog, followed up on my Don't Skim Over Text. The Organization of Language: From Rhythm to Meaning post. He points out that using an unnatural rhythm in a second language may make it more difficult to understand you:

The main point is that language has inherent rhythms which are crucial because they are where the meaning is found. When you read a text in your mother tongue, you naturally break it up into meaningful chunks and adjust your rhythm as appropriate. If you apply unnatural rhythm to a text, it will be difficult to follow and you may not understand what you’re saying, neither will others.

Prosody is a linguist's term having to do with the study of rhythm, intonation, and related attributes in speech:

Prosodic units do not always correspond to grammatical units, although both may reflect how the brain processes speech. Phrases and clauses are grammatical concepts, but they may have prosodic equivalents, commonly called prosodic units, intonation units, or declination units, which are the actual phonetic spurts or chunks of speech.

Wikipedia has some good examples of how prosody maps onto grammatical structure .