Tapping into linguistic rhythm

Abstract

Rhythmic properties of speech and language have been a matter of long-standing debates, with both traditional production and perception studies delivering controversial findings. The present study examines the possibility of investigating linguistic rhythm using movement-based paradigms. Informed by the theory and methods of sensorimotor synchronization, we developed two finger-tapping tasks (synchronization and reproduction), and tested them with English participants. The synchronization task required participants to tap along with the beat of a looped sentence while the reproduction task asked them to tap out the perceived beat patterns after listening to a sentence loop. The results showed that both tasks engaged participants in period tracking of a beat-like structure in the linguistic stimuli, though synchronization did so to a greater extent. Patterns obtained in the reproduction task tended to converge toward participants’ spontaneous tapping rates and showed a degree of regularization. Data collected in the synchronization task displayed a consistent anchoring of taps with the vowel onsets. Overall, synchronization performance with language resembled many well-established findings of sensorimotor synchronization with metronome and music. We conclude that our setting of the sensorimotor synchronization paradigm—finger tapping along with looped spoken phrases—is a valid experimentation tool for studying rhythm perception in language.