The Perception of Multilingual Speech Rhythm: A Universal or Language-Specific Experience?

This study examines speech rhythm perception in multilingual listeners, specifically L1 Polish-L2 English-L3 Norwegian speakers, and explores their ability to discriminate native and non-native rhythmic patterns across three languages. The study adopts a subtractive design in which multilingual listeners are compared with L1 Norwegian-L2 English controls. The listeners were divided into feedback and no-feedback groups to examine whether brief feedback influences rhythm perception. All stimuli were low-pass filtered and adjusted for pitch and volume to isolate temporal characteristics of speech. The results show that multilingual listeners perceived native Polish rhythm most accurately, indicating a relative advantage for the first language in rhythm perception. Among non-native languages, Norwegian was more clearly distinguished from Polish than English was. This pattern may be related to differences in linguistic experience and in the temporal characteristics of the selected speech samples, although their individual contributions cannot be established from the present design. Feedback did not improve accuracy, but it was associated with reduced differences in response times across languages. The findings suggest that language experience and sensitivity to temporal characteristics of speech may both contribute to multilingual rhythm perception. The study offers new evidence to the underexplored field of rhythm perception in multilingual speech and has implications for research on cross-linguistic rhythm processing.