This book is the result of a series of discussions, disputes, and reconciliations that we have had over the last five years in different -most often beautiful -places in Europe: Anche I'occhio vuole la sua parte (an Italian saying meaning 'The eye, too, needs its share').As the title suggests, Prosodic Phonology is primarily a book on phonological theory. It deals with domains in phonology and the interactions between phonology and the other components of the grammar, as well as with such related issues as perception and poetic meter. We have done our best to render the book accessible not only to phonologists but also to linguists working in other fields, as well as to scholars with a basic knowledge of generative grammar involved in research in neighboring disciplines.As the reader will immediately notice, certain languages have a privileged position in this book. This is not by chance: they are our native languages -Italian and English -and some other languages we have learned for necessity or pleasure -Dutch, Greek, French, and Spanish. We have not, however, limited our attention to these languages. Instead, we have attempted to provide a broader basis for our claims and thus have examined phenomena in over twenty-five languages, making use of grammars, previous linguistic analyses, and, whenever possible, intuitions of native speakers.Many people have contributed to the development of the ideas presented in this book, and several institutions have made its realization possible. The Dutch phonological community has been particularly important for having provided us with a stimulating and encouraging environment. In particular, we would like to thank Geert Booij, Harry van der Hulst, and Mieke Trommelen for having carefully read the entire manuscript in a short period of time and for having made valuable comments and suggestions. We are grateful to Sergio Scalise, who, besides reading and commenting on the entire manuscript, has offered us his time and insights during all stages of the preparation of this book. Ivonne Bordelois and Mauro Scorretti were always available for stimulating and pleasant discussions and gave us valuable comments on the chapters most related to syntax.

Spoken languages have been classified by linguists according to their rhythmic properties, and psycholinguists have relied on this classification to account for infants' capacity to discriminate languages. Although researchers have measured many speech signal properties, they have failed to identify reliable acoustic characteristics for language classes. This paper presents instrumental measurements based on a consonant/vowel segmentation for eight languages. The measurements suggest that intuitive rhythm types reflect specific phonological properties, which in turn are signaled by the acoustic/phonetic properties of speech. The data support the notion of rhythm classes and also allow the simulation of infant language discrimination, consistent with the hypothesis that newborns rely on a coarse segmentation of speech. A hypothesis is proposed regarding the role of rhythm perception in language acquisition.

Learning a language requires both statistical computations to identify words in speech and algebraic-like computations to discover higher level (grammatical) structure. Here we show that these computations can be influenced by subtle cues in the speech signal. After a short familiarization to a continuous speech stream, adult listeners are able to segment it using powerful statistics, but they fail to extract the structural regularities included in the stream even when the familiarization is greatly extended. With the introduction of subliminal segmentation cues, however, these regularities can be rapidly captured.

Spoken languages have been classified by linguists according to their rhythmic properties, and psycholinguists have relied on this classification to account for infants' capacity to discriminate languages. Although researchers have measured many speech signal properties, they have failed to identify reliable acoustic characteristics for language classes. This paper presents instrumental measurements based on a consonant/vowel segmentation for eight languages. The measurements suggest that intuitive rhythm types reflect specific phonological properties, which in turn are signaled by the acoustic/phonetic properties of speech. The data support the notion of rhythm classes and also allow the simulation of infant language discrimination, consistent with the hypothesis that newborns rely on a coarse segmentation of speech. A hypothesis is proposed regarding the role of rhythm perception in language acquisition.