The researchers compared how native English speakers and native Japanese speakers perceived identical sequences of alternating long and short tones. Japanese-speaking listeners were more likely to perceive the tones as long-short, while English listeners were more likely to perceive the tones as short-long. The Japanese language places unstressed “function words” (such as “the” and “to” in English and case markers indicating direct and indirect subjects and objects in Japanese) after nouns, creating long-short patterns like “hon-ga” (book the subject). The opposite is true of English, where short-long patterns dominate like “the book.” Previous researchers believed that short-long patterns were a universal rhythmic organizational principle, but this new study proves that to be false, perhaps merely a byproduct of English and other western languages.
The researchers also studied songs in each language and confirmed that Japanese songs show a bias to start phrases with a long-short pattern, consistent with Japanese linguistic patterns. By contrast, however, English songs showed no preference for starting phrases with short-long or long-short patterns (not surprising if you consider that English is such a polyglot language, borrowing words from hither and yon).
This study reminds of how sometimes when I’ve turned on the radio in the midst of an instrumental passage, I misperceive where the downbeat is, rendering a familiar song briefly strange and unrecognizable, something that doesn’t happen if I hear the song right from the beginning. It’s like hearing it in a different language.
