Application of a model of the auditory primal sketch to cross-linguistic differences in speech rhythm: Implications for the acquisition and recognition of speech

Abstract

It has long been noted that the world’s languages vary considerably in their rhythmic organization. Different languages seem to privilege different phonological units as their basic rhythmic unit, and there is now a large body of evidence that such differences have important consequences for crucial aspects of language acquisition and processing. The most fundamental finding is that the rhythmic structure of a language strongly influences the process of spoken-word recognition. This finding, together with evidence that infants are sensitive from birth to rhythmic differences between languages, and exploit rhythmic cues to segmentation at an earlier developmental stage than other cues prompted the claim that rhythm is the key which allows infants to begin building a lexicon and then go on to acquire syntax. It is therefore of interest to determine how differences in rhythmic organization arise at the acoustic/auditory level. In this paper, it is shown how an auditory model of the primitive representation of sound provides just such an account of rhythmic differences. Its performance is evaluated on a data set of French and English sentences and compared with the results yielded by the phonetic accounts of Frank Ramus and his colleagues and Esther Grabe and her colleagues.