Discrimination of syllable duration in English and French short sentences

Abstract

Two experiments were conducted in order to study the perceptual discrimination of syllable duration within sentences. Two natural French sentences and one English sentence, each consisting of eight syllables were resynthesized with 15% increases and decreases in syllable duration up to ± 60%. The modified, then randomized, stimuli were presented once to 20 subjects whose task was to judge how natural they sounded (experiment I). The same stimuli were then used to determine whether the modifications in duration were perceptible (experiment II). The results provide evidence of the fact that judgment of the rhythmic quality of sentences (a psycholinguistic task) and temporal discrimination (a psychoacoustic task) both have the same functional basis. The differential limen found in two experiments for both languages is remarkably similar and its estimated value is approximately 25% for an average syllable duration.