Nonlinguistic rhythm perception depends on culture and reflects the rhythms of speech: Evidence from English and Japanese

Does a listener’s native language influence the perception of nonverbal rhythms? One way to address this question is to examine the perception of rhythmic grouping, as suggested by Jakobson, Fant, and Halle in Preliminaries to Speech Analysis. Grouping refers to the perceptual clustering of events into higher level units such as phrases. Several principles of grouping of auditory patterns, established a century ago, have come to be thought of as innate properties of perception. The supporting data have come entirely from Western cultures, however. In this study, native English and Japanese speakers were tested for their perception of grouping in simple rhythmic sequences of tones. Members of the two cultures showed different patterns of perceptual grouping, demonstrating that basic auditory processes are shaped by culture. Furthermore, measurements of the temporal structure of English versus Japanese speech and music suggest that the observed differences reflect the rhythms of the two languages, rather than rhythmic differences between American and Japanese music. While it has long been known that a listener’s native language influences the perception of speech, these results suggest that native language can also exert an influence on general auditory perception at a basic level. [Supported by Neurosciences Research Foundation and by JSPS.]