The Language- Specific Interdependence of Tonal and Durational Cues in Perceived Rhythmicality

This experiment investigated whether fundamental frequency (f0) and duration are interdependent cues for the perceived rhythmicality of sentences, and whether this depends on the native language of listeners. The task required a judgement of which stimulus sentence had the most natural- sounding rhythm. In the stimuli, duration and f0 were manipulated on a certain syllable to test whether a deviant duration results in a less natural- sounding rhythm than a deviant f0 movement, or vice versa. The listeners were native speakers of Swiss German (SG), Swiss French (SFr) or French (Fr). SG and Fr differ from each other in terms of prosodic properties involving f0 and duration; in particular, their rhythms sound different. The results demonstrate that duration and f0 are interdependent cues for perceived rhythmicality, and that the relative significance of a non-deviant duration and a non-deviant f0 excursion in the rhythmicality judgements of listeners depends on their native language. Importantly, these findings have implications for current research on speech rhythm.