Language acquisition
Speech rhythm
My interest in infants' perception of rhythm led me to investigate, in collaboration with Marina Nespor (Ferrara), more fundamental aspects of speech rhythm and to contribute new data to the old question of whether languages can be sorted into a limited number of distinct "rhythm classes":
Ramus,
F., Nespor, M.,
& Mehler, J. (1999).
Correlates
of linguistic rhythm in the speech signal. Cognition, 73(3),
265-292. 
Ramus,
F., &
Mehler, J. (1999). Language
identification
with suprasegmental cues: A study based on speech resynthesis. Journal
of the Acoustical Society of America, 105(1), 512-521.
Ramus,
F. (2002).
Acoustic correlates of linguistic
rhythm:
Perspectives. In Proceedings of Speech
Prosody 2002, Aix-en-Provence, 11-13/04/02 (pp.
115-120).
Ramus,
F., Dupoux, E., &
Mehler,
J. (2003). The psychological reality of rhythm classes: Perceptual
studies.
Paper presented at the 15th International Congress of
Phonetic
Sciences,
Barcelona, 3-9/08/03 (pp. 337-342).
For my perceptual experiments I used speech resynthesis techniques. You can hear samples of my stimuli here.
