French Listeners' Deafness to Tashlhiyt Berber /bi/-/bbi/

In a discrimination experiment on Tashlhiyt Berber singleton-geminate contrasts (i.e., duration contrasts), we find that French listeners are more sensitive to silent closure duration in word-final /t/ than to voiced murmur, or even, frication duration in initial position. Native listeners of Tashlhiyt perform near-ceiling on all these contrasts. We propose that native listeners of French, in which gemination is not phonemic, have not acquired quantity contrasts but yet retain a perhaps universal sensitivity to rhythm, or more specifically to intergestural timing.