Hostname: page-component-6dbcb7884d-4kfsg Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-02-13T19:20:26.624Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Effects of experience with L2 and music on rhythmic grouping by French listeners*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 July 2015

NATALIE BOLL-AVETISYAN Open the ORCID record for NATALIE BOLL-AVETISYAN [Opens in a new window] ,
ANJALI BHATARA ,
ANNIKA UNGER ,
THIERRY NAZZI  and
BARBARA HÖHLE
NATALIE BOLL-AVETISYAN*
Affiliation:
Universität Potsdam
ANJALI BHATARA
Affiliation:
Université Paris Descartes; CNRS
ANNIKA UNGER
Affiliation:
Universität Potsdam
THIERRY NAZZI
Affiliation:
Université Paris Descartes; CNRS
BARBARA HÖHLE
Affiliation:
Universität Potsdam
*
Address for correspondence: Natalie Boll-Avetisyan, Universität Potsdam, Center of Cognitive Sciences, Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 24–25, 14476 Potsdam, Germanynboll@uni-potsdam.de
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Rhythm perception is assumed to be guided by a domain-general auditory principle, the Iambic/Trochaic Law, stating that sounds varying in intensity are grouped as strong-weak, and sounds varying in duration are grouped as weak-strong. Recently, Bhatara et al. (2013) showed that rhythmic grouping is influenced by native language experience, French listeners having weaker grouping preferences than German listeners. This study explores whether L2 knowledge and musical experience also affect rhythmic grouping. In a grouping task, French late learners of German listened to sequences of coarticulated syllables varying in either intensity or duration. Data on their language and musical experience were obtained by a questionnaire. Mixed-effect model comparisons showed influences of musical experience as well as L2 input quality and quantity on grouping preferences. These results imply that adult French listeners’ sensitivity to rhythm can be enhanced through L2 and musical experience.

Keywords

rhythmic groupingsecond language acquisitionprosodymusicalityIambic/Trochaic Law
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 19 , Issue 5 , November 2016 , pp. 971 - 986
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Thanks to Wiebke Bruchmüller, Carina Hoppe, Silke Schunack, Alexandra Schmitterer for help with recruiting and testing participants, to Tanner Sorensen for proof-reading the manuscript, and to Tom Fritzsche, Reinhold Kliegl, Daniel Schad and Sarah Risse for help with “R” and useful suggestions for the statistical analysis, and to Adamantios Gafos and Elliott Moreton for comments on prior versions of the manuscript. This work was supported by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche - Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft grant # 09-FASHS-018 and HO 1960/14-1 to Thierry Nazzi and Barbara Höhle.

References

Abrahamsson, N., & Hyltenstam, K. (2008). The robustness of aptitude effects in near-native second language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 30, 481–509.Google Scholar
Abboub, N., Bijeljac-Babic, R., Serres, J., & Nazzi, T. (2015). On the importance of being bilingual: Word stress processing in a context of segmental variability. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 132, 111–120.Google Scholar
Altenberg, E. P. (2005). The judgment, perception, and production of consonant clusters in a second language. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 43, 53–80.Google Scholar
Altmann, H. (2006). The Perception and Production of Second-Language Stress: A Cross-linguistic Experimental Study. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Delaware.Google Scholar
Bates, D., Maechler, M., & Bolker, B. (2012). lme4: Linear mixed-effects models using S4 classes. R package version 0.999999-0.Google Scholar
Beckman, M. E., & Pierrehumbert, J. (1986). Intonational structure in Japanese and English. Phonology Yearbook, 3, 255–309.Google Scholar
Best, C. T. (1995). A direct realist view of cross-language speech perception. In Strange, W. (ed.), Speech Perception and Linguistic Experience: Issues in Cross-Language Research, pp. 171–204. Timonium, MD: York Press.Google Scholar
Best, C. T., McRoberts, G. W., & Sithole, N. M. (1988). Examination of perceptual reorganization for nonnative speech contrasts: Zulu click discrimination by English-speaking adults and infants. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 14, 345–360.Google Scholar
Bhatara, A., Boll-Avetisyan, N., Agus, T., Höhle, B., & Nazzi, T. (in press). Language experience affects grouping of musical instrument sounds. Cognitive Science.Google Scholar
Bhatara, A., Boll-Avetisyan, N., Unger, A., Nazzi, T., & Höhle, B. (2013). Native language and stimulus complexity affect rhythmic grouping of speech. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 134, 3828–3843.Google Scholar
Bhatara, A., Yeung, H. H., & Nazzi, T. (2015). Foreign language learning in French speakers is associated with rhythm perception, but not with melody perception. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 41, 277–282.Google Scholar
Bijeljac-Babic, R., Serres, J., Höhle, B., & Nazzi, T. (2012). Effect of bilingualism on lexical stress pattern discrimination in Frenc-learning infants. PLOS ONE, 7, 1–8.Google Scholar
Bijeljac-Babic, R., Serres, J., Höhle, B., & Nazzi, T. (2013). Effect of bilingualism on the perception of lexical stress in 6-month-old French-learning infants. In Baiz, S., Goldman, N. & Hawkes, R. (eds.), Proceedings of the 37th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development.Google Scholar
Bion, R. A. H., Benavides-Varela, S., & Nespor, M. (2011). Acoustic markers of prominence influence infants’ and adults’ segmentation of speech sequences. Language and Speech, 54 123–140.Google Scholar
Boersma, P., & Weenink, D. (2010). Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 5.2.05, retrieved 10 October 2010 from http://www.praat.org/.Google Scholar
Boll-Avetisyan, N. (2012). Phonotactics and its Acquisition, Representation, and Use: An Experimental-Phonological Study (Vol. 298), Utrecht: LOT Dissertation series.Google Scholar
Bolton, T. L. (1894). Rhythm. American Journal of Psychology, 6, 145–238.Google Scholar
Bongaerts, T. (1999). Ultimate attainment in L2 pronunciation: The case of very advanced late L2 learners. In Birdsong, D. (ed.), Second language acquisition and the critical period hypothesis, pp. 133–159. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Burnham, D. (1986). Developmental loss of speech perception: Exposure to and experience with a first language. Applied Psycholinguistics, 7, 207–240.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crowhurst, M. J., & Teodocio Olivares, A. (2014). Beyond the Iambic-Trochaic Law: the joint influence of duration and intensity on the perception of rhythmic speech. Phonology, 31, 51–94.Google Scholar
Cutler, A. (1994). The perception of rhythm in language. Cognition, 50, 79–81.Google Scholar
Delattre, P. (1938). L'accent final en français: accent d'intensité, accent de hauteur, accent de durée ('The final accent in French: Intensity accent, pitch accent, duration accent'). The French Review, 12, 141–145.Google Scholar
Di Cristo, A. (1998). Intonation in French. In Hirst, D. & Di Cristo, A. (eds.), Intonation Systems: A Survey of Twenty Languages, pp. 195–218. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Díaz-Campos, M. (2004). Context of learning in the acquisition of Spanish second language phonology. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 26, 249–273.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dupoux, E., Pallier, C., Sebastian-Gallés, N., & Mehler, J. (1997). A destressing ‘deafness’ in French? Journal of Memory and Language, 36, 406–421.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dupoux, E., Peperkamp, S., & Sebastian-Gallés, N. (2010). Limits on bilingualism revisited: stress ‘deafness’ in simultaneous French-Spanish bilinguals. Cognition, 114, 266–275.Google Scholar
Dupoux, E., Peperkamp, S., & Sebastián-Gallés, N. (2001). A robust method to study stress ‘‘deafness’’. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 110, 1606–1618.Google Scholar
Dupoux, E., Sebastian-Gallés, N., Navarrete, E., & Peperkamp, S. (2008). Persistent stress ‘‘deafness’’: The case of French learners of Spanish. Cognition, 106, 682–706.Google Scholar
Dutoit, T., Pagel, V., Pierret, N., Bataille, F., & van der Vreken, O. (1996). The MBROLA project: Towards a Sst of high-quality speech synthesizers free of Uue for non-commercial purposes. Proceedings of the Proceedings of The Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP’96) 3.Google Scholar
Eckes, T. (2010). Der Online-Einstufungstest Deutsch als Fremdsprache (onDaF): Theoretische Grundlagen, Konstruktion und Validierung. In Grotjahn, R. (ed.), Der C-Test: Beiträge aus der aktuellen Forschung/The C-test: Contributions from current research, pp. 125–192. Frankfurt am Main: Lang.Google Scholar
Eckes, T., & Grotjahn, R. (2006). A closer look at the construct validity of C-tests. Language Testing, 23, 290–325.Google Scholar
Féry, C., Hörnig, R., & Pahaut, S. (2011). Correlates of phrasing in French and German from an experiment with semi-spontaneous speech. In Gabriel, C. & Lleó, C. (eds.), Intonational Phrasing in Romance and Germanic: Cross-linguistic and Bilingual Studies. Vol. 10, pp. 11–42. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flege, J. E. (1995). Second language speech learning: Theory, findings, and problems. In Strange, W. (ed.), Speech Perception and Linguistic Experience: Issues in cross-language research, pp. 233–272. Timonium, MD: York Press.Google Scholar
Flege, J. E., & Liu, S. (2001). The effect of experience on adults' acquisition of a Second language. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 23, 527–552.Google Scholar
Flege, J. E., Yeni-Komshian, G. H., & Liu, S. (1999). Age constraints on second-language acquisition. Journal of Memory and Language, 41, 78–104.Google Scholar
Gottfried, T. L., Staby, A. M., & Ziemer, C. J. (2004). Musical experience and Mandarin tone discrimination. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 115, 2545–2545.Google Scholar
Hay, J. F., & Diehl, R. L. (2007). Perception of rhythmic grouping: Testing the iambic/trochaic law. Perception & Psychophysics, 69, 113–122.Google Scholar
Hay, J. F., & Saffran, J. R. (2012). Rhythmical grouping biases constrain infant statistical learning. Infancy, 17, 610–641.Google Scholar
Hayes, B. (1985). Iambic and trochaic rhythm in stress rules. In Niepokuj, M. et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society.Google Scholar
Hayes, B. (1995). Metrical stress theory: principles and case studies, Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Höhle, B., Bijeljac-Babic, R., Herold, B., Weissenborn, J., & Nazzi, T. (2009). Language specific prosodic preferences during the first half year of life: Evidence from German and French infants. Infant Behavior and Development, 32, 262–274.Google Scholar
Huang, B. H., & Jun, S.-A. (2011). The Effect of Age on the Acquisition of Second Language Prosody. Language and Speech, 54, 387–414.Google Scholar
Iversen, J. R., Patel, A. D., & Ohgushi, K. (2008). Perception of rhythmic grouping depends on auditory experience. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 124, 2263–2271.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jaeger, T. F. (2008). Categorical data analysis: Away from ANOVAs (transformation or not) and towards logit mixed models. Journal of Memory and Language, 59, 434–446.Google Scholar
Jun, S.-A., & Fougeron, C. (2000). A phonological model of French intonation. In Botinis, A. (ed.), Intonation: Analysis, Modeling and Technology, pp. 209–242. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.Google Scholar
Jun, S.-A., & Fougeron, C. (2002). Realizations of accentual phrase in French intonation. Probus, 14, 147–172.Google Scholar
Kijak, A. M. (2009). How stressful is L2 stress? A cross-linguistic study of L2 perception and production of metrical systems (Vol. 214), Utrecht: LOT.Google Scholar
Klatt, D. (1976). Linguistic uses of segmental duration in English: Acoustic and perceptual evidence. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 59, 1208–1221.Google Scholar
Kolinsky, R., Cuvelier, H., Goftry, V., Peretz, I., & Morais, J. (2009). Music training facilitates lexical stress processing. Music Perception, 22, 235–246.Google Scholar
Kusumoto, K., & Moreton, E. (1997). Native language determines parsing of nonlinguistic rhythmic stimuli. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 105, 3204.Google Scholar
Lerdahl, F., & Jackendoff, R. (1983). Generative Theory of Tonal Music, Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Lin, C. Y., Wang, M., Idsardi, W. J., & Xu, Y. (2014). Stress processing in Mandarin and Korean second language learners of English. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 17, 316–346.Google Scholar
Marian, V., Blumenfeld, H. K., & Kaushanskaya, M. (2007). The language experience and proficiency questionnaire (LEAP-Q): Assessing language profiles in bilinguals and multilinguals. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 50, 940–967.Google Scholar
Molnar, M., Lallier, M., & Carreiras, M. (2014). The Amount of Language Exposure Determines Nonlinguistic Tone Grouping Biases in Infants From a Bilingual Environment. Language Learning, 64, 45–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moyer, A. (2011). An investigation of experience in L2 phonology: Does quality matter more than quantity? The Canadian Modern Language Review/La Revue Canadienne des Langues Vivantes, 67, 191–216.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Munoz, C., & Singleton, D. (2011). A critical review of age-related research on L2 ultimate attainment. Language Teaching, 44, 1–35.Google Scholar
Narmour, E. (1990). The analysis and cognition of basic melodic structures, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Nespor, M., Shukla, M., Vijver, R. v. d., Avesani, C., Schraudolf, H., & Donati, C. (2008). Different phrasal prominence realization in VO and OV languages. Lingue e linguaggio, 7, 1–28.Google Scholar
Peperkamp, S., Vendelin, I., & Dupoux, E. (2010). Perception of predictable stress: A cross-linguistic investigation. Journal of Phonetics, 38, 422–430.Google Scholar
Polka, L. (1991). Cross-language speech perception in adults: Phonemic, phonetic, and acoustic contributions. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 89, 2961–2977.Google Scholar
Schmidt-Kassow, M., Rothermich, K., Schwartze, M., & Kotz, S. A. (2011). Did you get the beat? Late proficient French-German learners extract strong-weak patterns in tonal but not in linguistic sequences. Neuroimage, 54, 568–576.Google Scholar
Service, E., & Kohonen, V. (1995). Is the relation between phonological memory and foreign language learning accounted for by vocabulary acquisition? Applied Psycholinguistics, 16, 155–172.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Skoruppa, K., Pons, F., Bosch, L., Christophe, A., Cabrol, D., & Peperkamp, S. (2013). The Development of Word Stress Processing in French and Spanish Infants. Language Learning and Development, 9, 88–104.Google Scholar
Skoruppa, K., Pons, F., Christophe, A., Bosch, L., Dupoux, E., Sebastián-Gallés, N., Alves Limissuri, R., & Peperkamp, S. (2009). Language-specific stress perception by 9-month-old French and Spanish infants. Developmental Science, 12, 914–919.Google Scholar
Slevc, L. R., & Miyake, A. (2006). Individual differences in Second-language proficiency: does musical ability matter? Psychological Science, 17, 675–681.Google Scholar
R Core Team (2012). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.Google Scholar
Todd, N. (1985). A model of expressive timing in tonal music. Music Perception, 3, 33–58.Google Scholar
Tremblay, A. (2008). Is second language lexical access prosodically constrained? Processing of word stress by French Canadian second language learners of English. Applied Psycholinguistics, 29, 553–584.Google Scholar
Tremblay, A. (2009). Phonetic variability and the variable perception of L2 word stress by French Canadian listeners. International Journal of Bilingualism, 13, 35–62.Google Scholar
Tremblay, A. (2011). Proficiency assessment standards in Second langage acquisition research: “Clozing” the gap. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 33, 339–372.Google Scholar
Welby, P. (2006). French intonational structure: Evidence from tonal alignment. Journal of Phonetics, 34, 343–371.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Werker, J. F., & Tees, R. C. (1984). Cross-language speech perception: Evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of life. Infant Behavior and Development, 7, 49–63.Google Scholar
Wickham, H. (2009). ggplot2: Elegant graphics for data analysis. New York: Springer.Google Scholar
Woodrow, H. (1909). A quantitative study of rhythm: The effect of variations in intensity, rate, and duration. Archives of Psychology, 14, 1–66.Google Scholar
Woodrow, H. (1911). The role of pitch in rhythm. Psychological Review, 54–77.Google Scholar
Wong, P. C. M., Skoe, E., Russo, N. M., Dees, T., & Kraus, N. (2007). Musical experience shapes human brainstem encoding of linguistic pitch patterns. Nature Neuroscience, 10, 420–422.Google Scholar
Wurm, L. H., & Fisicaro, S. A. (2014). What residualizing predictors in regression analyses does (and what it does not do). Journal of Memory and Language, 72, 37–48.Google Scholar
York, R. (2012). Residualization is not the answer: rethinking how to address multicollinearity. Social Science Research, 41, 1379–1386.Google Scholar
Yoshida, K. A., Iversen, J. R., Patel, A. D., Mazuka, R., Nito, H., Gervain, J., & Werker, J. F. (2010). The development of perceptual grouping biases in infancy: A Japanese-English cross-linguistic study. Cognition, 115, 356–361.Google Scholar
Zuk, J., Ozernov-Palchik, O., Kim, H., Lakshminarayanan, K., Gabrieli, J. D. E., Tallal, P., & Gaab, N. (2013). Enhanced syllable discrimination thresholds in musicians. PLOS ONE, 8 (12).Google Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Boll-Avetisyan supplementary material

Tables S1-S3 and Figure S1

Download Boll-Avetisyan supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 307.6 KB