Rhythm and meter in spoken-word perception 1 Running head: RHYTHM AND METER IN SPOKEN-WORD PERCEPTION Rhythmic regularity and metrical expectancy in spoken-word perception

Certain types of speech, e.g. lists of words or numbers, are usually spoken with a clear speech rhythm. Salient, stressed vowels are aligned to rhythmic points within the phrase period. The main hypothesis of this study (derived from the Dynamic Attending Theory; M.R. Jones (1976), Psych. Rev. 83, 323–355) is that listeners attend in particular to speech events at these rhythmic time points. Better rhythmic regularity should improve spoken-word perception. Previous studies that suggested only a weak effect of speech rhythm on spoken-word perception, suffered from poor control over speech rhythm in their stimuli. A phoneme monitoring experiment is reported, in which listeners heard lists of disyllabic words in which the rhythm of the stressed vowels was either regular (with equidistant inter-stress intervals) or jittery. In addition, metrical expectancy was controlled by varying the stress pattern of the target word, as either the same or the opposite of the stress pattern in its preceding words. Resulting RTs show a main effect of rhythmic regularity, but not of metrical expectancy. Rhythmic regularity had its strongest effect in the perception of iambic words. These results suggest that listeners employ attentional rhythms in spoken-word perception, and that a clear rhythm improves speech communication.