The Roles of Linguistic Experience, Direction of Rhythmic Change, and Timing Cues in Discriminating Different Rhythmic Patterns

Abstract

This research examined the roles of linguistic experience, direction of rhythmic change and timing cue in the discrimination of different rhythmic patterns by native speakers of English, Chinese advanced EFL learners, Korean advanced EFL learners and Chinese beginning EFL learners in an AAX discrimination test. Results showed that the participants were able to discriminate the rhythmic patterns of different utterances, but the discrimination was not driven by their linguistic experience. Rather, their performances were dependent on the rhythmic patterns of the context stimuli (AA stimuli) in the AAX trial. Participants performed better in the trails where the X stimuli were preceded by syllable- timed AA stimuli. Regarding the role of timing cues in rhythm discrimination, the speech rhythm differences made bigger contributions to rhythm discrimination than speech tempo differences. Moreover, the timing cues of vocalic intervals played more important roles than their consonantal counterparts.