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TY - GEN ID - cogprints218 UR - http://cogprints.org/218/ A1 - Ramus, Franck A1 - Nespor, Marina A1 - Mehler, Jacques TI - Correlates of linguistic rhythm in the speech signal Y1 - 1999/// N2 - Spoken languages have been classified by linguists according to their rhythmic properties, and psycholinguists have relied on this classification to account for infants� capacity to discriminate languages. Although researchers have measured many speech signal properties, they have failed to identify reliable acoustic characteristics for language classes. This paper presents instrumental measurements based on a consonant/vowel segmentation for eight languages. The measurements suggest that intuitive rhythm types reflect specific phonological properties, which in turn are signaled by the acoustic/phonetic properties of speech. The data support the notion of rhythm classes and also allow the simulation of infant language discrimination, consistent with the hypothesis that newborns rely on a coarse segmentation of speech. A hypothesis is proposed regarding the role of rhythm perception in language acquisition. AV - public KW - speech rhythm KW - phonetics KW - consonant KW - vowel KW - language discrimination KW - phonological bootstrapping KW - speech segmentation KW - syllable structure KW - language acquisition ER -