Language identification with suprasegmental cues: A study based on speech resynthesis

Abstract

This paper proposes a new experimental paradigm to explore the discriminability of languages, a question which is crucial to the child born in a bilingual environment. This paradigm employs the speech resynthesis technique, enabling the experimenter to preserve or degrade acoustic cues such as phonotactics, syllabic rhythm, or intonation from natural utterances. English and Japanese sentences were resynthesized, preserving broad phonotactics, rhythm, and intonation (condition 1), rhythm and intonation (condition 2), intonation only (condition 3), or rhythm only (condition 4). The findings support the notion that syllabic rhythm is a necessary and sufficient cue for French adult subjects to discriminate English from Japanese sentences. The results are consistent with previous research using low-pass filtered speech, as well as with phonological theories predicting rhythmic differences between languages. Thus, the new methodology proposed appears to be well suited to study language discrimination. Applications for other domains of psycholinguistic research and for automatic language identification are considered.