Language acquisition - 3
Speech rhythm
My interest in infants' perception of rhythm has 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.(pdf
reprint
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.(pdf
reprint)
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). (pdf
preprint)
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). (pdf
reprint)
For my perceptual experiments I used speech resynthesis techniques. You can hear samples of my stimuli here.
