Role of rhythmic and intonational cues in language discrimination.

Abstract

Languages differ in rhythm as well as intonation. Research indicates that adult listeners are able to use rhythm to discriminate between two languages from different rhythm classes [Ramus Mehler, (1999)]. For languages within the same rhythm class, adults are able to use to use intonation to discriminate between languages like English and Dutch, but only when one of the languages is familiar [Ramus and Mehler, (1999); Pijper, (1983)]. It remains unclear if the rhythmic differences between languages in the same rhythm class are enough to support language discrimination. In this paper, we tested American English listeners’ ability to categorize re-synthesized American English and German sentences or American and Australian English sentences from which all segmental information had been removed. English and German are from the same rhythm class and differ in intonation; whereas American and Australian English can be thought to be rhythmically identical, but differ in intonation. Subjects were tested in three conditions: (a) with only intonational cues; (b) with only rhythmic cues; and (c) both intonational and rhythmic cues. Preliminary results indicate that listeners rely on rhythm, but not intonation, to distinguish between English and German, and only on intonation to distinguish between American and Australian English.