It is proposed that the theory of dynamical systems offers appropriate tools to model many phonological aspects of both speech production and perception. A dynamic account of speech rhythm is shown to be useful for description of both Japanese mora timing and English timing in a phrase repetition task. This orientation contrasts fundamentally with the more familiar symbolic approach to phonology, in which time is modeled only with sequentially arrayed symbols. It is proposed that an adaptive oscillator offers a useful model for perceptual entrainment (or `locking in') to the temporal patterns of speech production. This helps to explain why speech is often perceived to be more regular than experimental measurements seem to justify. Because dynamic models deal with real time, they also help us understand how languages can differ in their temporal detail---contributing to foreign accents, for example. The fact that languages differ greatly in their temporal detail suggests that these effe...

A recent work by Ramus and colleagues has renewed the interest in rhythm typology connected to the evaluation of speech production data. They proposed that differences in rhythm type could be accounted for by a segmental set of variables derived from the acoustic duration of consonants and vowels. However, rhythm typology can be more interestingly characterized and understood by modeling speech rhythm production. The purpose of our study is then threefold: (a) showing why a deeper understanding of languages' rhythmic types can only be achieved by modeling their underlying rhythmic systems; (b) presenting the results of the implementation of a coupled-oscillator rhythmic system which simulates language-specific continuous patterns of syllable-sized durations; (c) suggesting that only a rhythmic system integrated to a gestural framework can account for the complexity of rhythm phenomena.

An empirical metric is developed to measure similarity or distance between the prosodic systems of diverse languages. Two physical variables which carry prosodic information, F 0 and amplitude envelope modulation, are used as inputs in a pairwise language discrimination task. A novel neural network model is trained to discriminate among pairs of languages drawn from a set of ten languages in a telephone speech database. Network performance is used to obtain a distance metric for each pair, allowing overall similarity relationships within the 10 language set to be identified. Results are presented for F 0 alone, in which Mandarin and Japanese are found to be clearly distinguished from all other languages in the database, and French is found to be clearly distinguishable, even from related Indo-European languages. Using amplitude envelope modulation alone, a cluster of languages usually described as syllable-timed is identified. Vietnamese and Farsi are found to be rhythmicall...