Unlike Italian, English is stress-timed, which means that it gets its rhythm from the stressed syllables only. This means that the time between one stressed syllable and the next is the same whether there are no unstressed syllables between, or whether there are four. This requires unstressed syllables to be highly compressible, which is why we use schwa and the short ‘i’ so frequently.

This lesson uses the last part of the Gettysburg Address to demonstrate this.