The learnability of language-specific fundamental frequency-based rhythmic patterns

Abstract

In addition to durational patterns, melodic patterns from variations in f0 contribute to percepts of speech rhythm, too (June 2005, Niebuhr 2009). The overall regularity of these melodic patterns is language-specific. In lexical tonal languages like Mandarin, f0 patterns may be quite variable, as many or all syllables may be associated with a tone; in stress-accent languages like English, f0 variation may be less variable as it is driven by stress and prosodic boundaries (Eady, 1982). In accentual phrase languages like Bengali and French, f0 variation is typically quite regular as it is driven almost entirely by prosodic boundaries in a very constrained way. With only acoustic parameters from the input available, are melodic patterns from these different kinds of languages learnable? And how is learnability affected if speech is directed to young infants? To study this, we recorded parents reading language samples in laboratory speech and in simulated infant directed speech in the languages mentioned above, and we are analyzing the speech with durational and f0 variability measures and prosodic (ToBI) labels. We will present results on learnability of melodic patterns using computational methods for pattern classification from a selection of the languages.