Perception and production of linguistic and musical rhythm by Korean and English middle school students

Abstract

I examine rhythmic tendencies of Korean and Western middle school students in linguistic and abstract musical contexts using a series of speaking and clapping experiments. Results indicate a preference in both groups for beat subdivisions in small integer ratios and simple binary metric interpretations. These preferences are consistently more exaggerated in native English speaking students than in Korean students. Tempo was a significant factor in all tasks.

Review of "Perception and production of linguistic and musical rhythm by Korean and English middle school students" by Lydia N. Slobodian

“…IN a creative and ambitious study in this issue (Slobodian, 2008), Korean and English speakers were tested with a battery of rhythm perception and production tasks, covering both speech and musical rhythm, in order to determine if culture plays a role in shaping such behaviors. Several tendencies (toward binary meters and reproducing rhythms using small integer duration ratios) have been found in prior work (and are summarized by Slobodian), but their universality is a matter of debate, for there is evidence that they might depend on culture (Hannon and Trehub, 2005;Sadakata, et al, 2004;Ohgushi, 2006), but also that there might exist predispositions for duple meter (Bergeson and Trehub, 2006).…”

“…There may, however, be another way of reading the results on the tendency to hear binary meters (Figure 12 in Slobodian, 2008) that doesn't view the Korean results as simply an attenuated version of English results. Specifically, Korean listeners more consistently interpreted rhythms containing 2:1 ratios in compound meter, but English listeners switched to binary interpretations at slow tempi, even though such interpretation required syncopation.…”

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ABSTRACT: Interest in possible cultural influences on basic rhythm perception and production has been growing, and the paper by Slobodian (2008) fits squarely in this trend, studying rhythm perception and production in a large number English and Korean native speakers. The findings were interpreted in terms of cross-cultural similarity, suggesting that preferences, e.g.

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Investigating prosody in music and speech

“…Here we investigate whether linguistic background may also influence musical expressivity.While some empirical work on cross-lingusitic influences upon musical performance exists (e.g. [7][8] [9]), none have involved both ecological validity (use of repertoire from the Western classical canon in a performance setting) and analyses of the participants' speech.…”