Abstract
The present study examined the cross-modal cueing effect of musical rhythmic beats on non-native speech rhythm production. Two groups of Chinese learners of French were cued respectively with rhythmic beats that either matched (matching group) or mismatched (mismatching group) the rhythm patterns of the target French sentences. The participants were asked to produce the target sentences after cueing and their speech production was compared with their baseline condition in which no cueing was used. The results showed that the matching group produced the target French rhythm significantly better after cueing with musical rhythmic beats that matched the French rhythm, in contrast to the mismatching group where no significant improvement was found. Individual differences in auditory short-term memory and rhythmic skills were not related to improvement in producing French rhythm after cueing. The results suggest that musical rhythmic cueing can be used to improve non-native speech rhythm production, further indicating a close link between speech and music in the temporal domain.
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The data that support the findings of this study are available at:https://osf.io/jxysw/?view_only=8e4eb5e8e7a14482b8a7adbeea266523
Notes
We also performed regression and correlation analyses for each of the three rhythm tasks separately. Similar patterns have been obtained (i.e., non-significant results), and please refer to Appendix 2 and 3 of the supplementary materials for more details.
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This work was supported by the Program of the Shanghai Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science (No. 2022EYY006).
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Liu, X., Liu, Y. Music Rhythmic Cueing for the Production of Non-native Speech Rhythm: Evidence from Chinese Learners of French. J Psycholinguist Res 53, 10 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-024-10044-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-024-10044-1