Correlates of linguistic rhythm in the speech signal (vol 73, pg 265, 1999)

Spoken languages have been classified by linguists according to their rhyth mic properties, and psycholinguists have relied on this classification to a ccount for infants' capacity to discriminate languages. Although researcher s have measured many speech signal properties, they have failed to identify reliable acoustic characteristics for language classes. This paper present s instrumental measurements based on a consonant/vowel segmentation for eig ht languages. The measurements suggest that intuitive rhythm types reflect specific phonological properties, which in turn are signaled by the acousti c/phonetic properties of speech. The data support the notion of rhythm clas ses and also allow the simulation of infant language discrimination, consis tent with the hypothesis that newborns rely on a coarse segmentation of spe ech. A hypothesis is proposed regarding the role of rhythm perception in la nguage acquisition. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.