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Rhythm plays an important role in language perception and learning, with infants perceiving rhythmic differences across languages at birth. While the mechanisms underlying rhythm perception in speech remain unclear, one interesting possibility is that these mechanisms are similar to those involved in the perception of musical rhythm. In this work, we adopt a model originally designed for musical rhythm to simulate speech rhythm perception. We show that this model replicates the behavioral results of language discrimination in newborns, and outperforms an existing model of infant language discrimination. We also find that percussives — fast-changing components in the acoustics — are necessary for distinguishing languages of different rhythms, which suggests that percussives are essential for rhythm perception. Our music-inspired model of speech rhythm may be seen as a first step towards a unified theory of how rhythm is represented in speech and music. 

In acquiring language, differences in input can greatly affect learning outcomes, but which aspects of language learning are most sensitive to input variations, and which are robust, remains debated. A recent modeling study successfully reproduced a phenomenon empirically observed in early phonetic learning---learning about the sounds of the native language in the first year of life---despite using input that differed in quantity and speaker composition from what a typical infant would hear. In this paper, we carry out a direct test of that model's robustness to input variations. We find that, despite what the original result suggested, the learning outcomes are sensitive to properties of the input and that more plausible input leads to a better fit with empirical observations. This has implications for understanding early phonetic learning in infants and underscores the importance of using realistic input in models of language acquisition.