Abstract:
This paper reports the results of a cycling experiment in Korean, a paradigm in which speakers produce short phrases in time with a metronome. It was hypothesized that in Korean the onsets of accentual phrases would act as beats in this task, playing the same part as stress plays in English; therefore, the accentual phase onsets would remain in the same phase within a cycle independently of their composition. Speakers read Korean sentences with three accentual phrases that had the same number of syllables or differed so one of the accentual phrases had twice as many syllables as the others; the composition of the syllables also varied between CV and CVC. The results so far suggest that speakers keep the accentual phrases in phase although the variation of syllable count and composition also affected phasing. This provides evidence that cycling is a viable task in Korean and supports our hypothesis about the role of the accentual phrase in Korean rhythm. Finally, the relative importance of the syllable cycle supports a view of rhythm that does not rest on the timing of one prosodic constituent, such as the accentual phrase, but on the relative salience of different levels of prosodic structure.