TY  - GEN
ID  - cogprints801
UR  - http://cogprints.org/801/
A1  - Ramus, Franck
A1  - Mehler, Jacques
Y1  - 1999///
N2  - This paper proposes a new experimental paradigm to explore the discriminability of languages, a question which is crucial to the child born in a bilingual environment. This paradigm employs the speech resynthesis technique, enabling the experimenter to preserve or degrade acoustic cues such as phonotactics, syllabic rhythm or intonation from natural utterances. English and Japanese sentences were resynthesized, preserving broad phonotactics, rhythm and intonation (Condition 1), rhythm and intonation (Condition 2), intonation only (Condition 3), or rhythm only (Condition 4). The findings support the notion that syllabic rhythm is a necessary and sufficient cue for French adult subjects to discriminate English from Japanese sentences. The results are consistent with previous research using low-pass filtered speech, as well as with phonological theories predicting rhythmic differences between languages. Thus, the new methodology proposed appears to be well-suited to study language discrimination. Applications for other domains of psycholinguistic research and for automatic language identification are considered.
KW  - language acquisition
KW  -  bilingualism
KW  -  language discrimination
KW  -  speech perception
KW  -  prosody
KW  -  rhythm
KW  -  phonetics
KW  -  phonology
KW  -  consonants
KW  -  vowels
KW  -  speech synthesis
KW  -  delexicalization
KW  -  low-pass filtering
TI  - Language identification with suprasegmental cues: A study based on speech resynthesis
SP  - 512
AV  - public
EP  - 521
ER  -

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