Perception of rhythmic grouping: Testing the iambic/trochaic law

Abstract

This study was designed to test the iambic/trochaic law, which claims that elements contrasting in duration naturally form rhythmic groupings with final prominence, whereas elements contrasting in intensity form groupings with initial prominence. It was also designed to evaluate whether the iambic/trochaic law describes general auditory biases, or whether rhythmic grouping is speech or language specific. In two experiments, listeners were presented with sequences of alternating /ga/ syllables or square wave segments that varied in either duration or intensity and were asked to indicate whether they heard a trochaic (i.e., strong-weak) or an iambic (i.e., weak-strong) rhythmic pattern. Experiment 1 provided a validation of the iambic/trochaic law in English-speaking listeners; for both speech and nonspeech stimuli, variations in duration resulted in iambic grouping, whereas variations in intensity resulted in trochaic grouping. In Experiment 2, no significant differences were found between the rhythmic-grouping performances of English- and French-speaking listeners. The speech/ nonspeech and cross-language parallels suggest that the perception of linguistic rhythm relies largely on general auditory mechanisms. The applicability of the iambic/trochaic law to speech segmentation is discussed.