title: Correlates of linguistic rhythm in the speech signal
creator: Ramus, Franck
creator: Nespor, Marina
creator: Mehler, Jacques
subject: Developmental Psychology
subject: Learnability
subject: Phonology
subject: Psycholinguistics
description: 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.
publisher: Elsevier Science
contributor: Mehler, Jacques
date: 1999
type: Journal (Paginated)
type: PeerReviewed
format: application/pdf
identifier: http://cogprints.org/869/3/rhythm98.pdf
identifier:   Ramus, Franck and Nespor, Marina and Mehler, Jacques  (1999) Correlates of linguistic rhythm in the speech signal.  [Journal (Paginated)]     
relation: http://cogprints.org/869/