Purpose: We investigated whether rhythm discrimination is mainly driven by the native language of the listener or by the fundamental design of the human auditory system and universal cognitive mechanisms shared by all people irrespective of rhythmic patterns in their native language. Method: In multiple experiments, we asked participants to listen…

In five experiments, we tested segmentation of word forms from natural speech materials by 8-month-old monolingual infants who are acquiring Canadian French or Canadian English. These two languages belong to different rhythm classes; Canadian French is syllable-timed and Canada English is stress-timed. Findings of Experiments 1, 2, and 3 show that…

Phonological development was assessed in six alphabetic orthographies (English, French, Greek, Icelandic, Portuguese and Spanish) at the beginning and end of the first year of reading instruction. The aim was to explore contrasting theoretical views regarding: the question of the availability of phonology at the outset of learning to read (Study…

Recent evidence suggests that the musical rhythm of a particular culture may parallel the speech rhythm of that culture's language (Patel, A. D., & Daniele, J. R. (2003). "An empirical comparison of rhythm in language and music." "Cognition, 87," B35-B45). The present experiments aimed to determine whether listeners actually perceive such rhythmic…

In the translation of songs, to the usual problems of rendering meaning, symbols and imagery are added the exigencies of cadence, rhythm, tempo and tonic accent. The process is illustrated by an account of the rendering in French of the musical comedy, "The Fantasticks." (Text is in French.) (AMH)

The world's languages display important differences in their rhythmic organization; most particularly, different languages seem to privilege different phonological units (mora, syllable, or stress foot) as their basic rhythmic unit. There is now considerable evidence that such differences have important consequences for crucial aspects of language…

Results of study indicate that vowel reduction is much more marked in English than in French, German or Spanish and that each one of the four languages offers a reduction pattern of its own. (Author/FWB)

The phonological rhythm of French is characterized by a tendency to syllabic isochrony within an utterance and a clear final lengthening, whereas the rhythm of English is stress-timed. A study of babbling at a turning period of the child's development has shown that the French child acquires adult phonological rhythm quite early in interactive…

The English speaker learning French tends to interpret the sound characteristics of the second language according to English conventions. The term "sound characteristics" as used here refers to the phonetic aspects, the rhythm, and the intonation of French. A number of examples are given to support the theory that insufficient knowledge of these…

This collection of papers on linguistic experiments includes: "Initial Tones and Prominence in Seoul Korean" (Ken de Jong); "The Domains of Laryngeal Feature Lenition Effects in Chonnam Korean" (Sun-Ah Jun); "The Timing of Lip Rounding and Tongue Backing for /u/" Gina M. Lee); "Prosody and Intrasyllabic Timing in…

These 14 articles on aspects of linguistics include the following: "Economy and Optionality: Interpretations of Subjects in Italian" (David Adger); "Collaborative Repair in EFL Classroom Talk" (Zara Iles); "A Timing Model for Fast French" (Eric Keller, Brigitte Zellner); "Another Travesty of Representation:…