Rhythm typology of Korean speech

According to their rhythmic properties, spoken languages have been classified by linguists into three categories, i.e. “stress-timed”, “syllable-timed” and “mora-timed”. Recently, this intuitive classification has been confirmed valid with perceptual studies. These studies have shown that both newborn infants and adults, upon hearing the pure rhythms of certain languages, are only able to discriminate between languages of the different categories mentioned above. These results indicate that the capacity of the categorization of the human cognitive system makes possible the classification of language that is not yet explored rhythmically. Here, we investigate the Korean spoken language through the adult’s discrimination tasks with resynthesized speech. Experimental results indicate that the Korean language is, like Japanese, one of the mora-timed languages.