关键词: 抑扬-扬抑规律, 节奏组块, 普通话

Abstract: Two perceptual grouping principles, iambic/trochaic law (ITL), have been found over a century ago by Bolton (1984) and Woodrow (1909). Hayes (1995) proposed this law describes humans’ tendency to form trochaic groups over sequences varying in intensity (i.e., the loudest sounds mark group beginning), and iambic groups over sequences varying in duration (i.e., the longest sounds mark group ending). This perceptual grouping has traditionally been thought to be governed by innate, universal principles. However, recent work has found that language or music background may modulate the use of ITL, meaning that these perceptual grouping preferences may instead be a consequence of language exposure. Researches has investigated how adults and infants speaking Italian, Turkish, Japanese, English or Spanish group sequences of syllables, tones or musical instrument sounds. Compared with these languages, Mandarin has its own unique features, such as rhyme, tone and so on. In this study, we explore Mandarin speakers' perceptual grouping preference of non-linguistic sounds by using a grouping task. Each sound sequence was constituted with basic and altering sound in turn, which would last 10s. To assure that the sequences were fully ambiguous in terms of an iambic or a trochaic organization, the beginning and the end of each intensity and duration sequence faded in and out 1.5s. In addition, each sequence was played forward (i.e. starting with basic sound) or backward (i.e. starting with the altering sound). In the intensity condition, changing tone was built with either 60dB or 65dB. In the duration condition, changing tone was built with either 250ms-long or 200ms-long sine wave. The acoustics parameters of base tone were set 150ms in duration, 55dB in intensity and 256Hz in F0 successively. In addition, six filler sequence were also inserted with each condition. Hence in each condition, participants would finish 30 trails. Twenty-nine participants completed the intensity condition, and twenty-six participants finished the duration condition. After each sound, they were asked to indicate whether they have heard a trochaic (i.e., strong-weak) or an iambic (i.e., weak-strong) rhythmic pattern. In the intensity condition, participants showed a soft trochaic grouping bias (M = 0.549, p = 0.091,d = 0.33), as predicted by the ITL. In the duration condition, participants exhibited a trochaic preference (M = 0.566, p = 0.019,d = 0.52), which is different from ITL. These experiments provide new evidence for the proposal that intensity information draws upon a universal mechanism in ITL across languages, yet ITL in duration is shaped by language experience. Especially, light tone may be one of the factors for Mandarin native speakers. Further studies should investigate the effects of Mandarin tone or even dialectal tone on the perception of rhythmic grouping.

Key words: iambic/trochaic law, rhythmic grouping, Mandarin