Psychon Bull Rev (2011) 18:1035–1041 DOI 10.3758/s13423-011-0163-0 BRIEF REPORT Listeners feel the beat: Entrainment to English and French speech rhythms Pascale Lidji & Caroline Palmer & Isabelle Peretz & Michele Morningstar Published online: 13 September 2011 # The Author(s) 2011. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract Can listeners entrain to speech rhythms? Monolingual speakers of English and French and balanced English–French bilinguals tapped along with the beat they perceived in sentences spoken in a stress- timed language, English, and a syllable-timed language, French. All groups of participants tapped more regu- larly to English than to French utterances. Tapping performance was also influenced by the participants’ native language: English-speaking participants and bilinguals tapped more regularly and at higher metrical levels than did French-speaking participants, suggesting that long-term linguistic experience with a stress-timed language can differentiate speakers’ entrainment to speech rhythm. Keywords Speech rhythm . Sensorimotor synchronization . Entrainment . Stress-timed language . Syllable-timed language . Psycholinguistics . Speech perception . Phonology . Embodied cognition P. Lidji : C. Palmer (*) : M. Morningstar Department of Psychology, McGill University, 1205 Dr Penfield Ave, QC H3A1B1, Montreal, Quebec, Canada e-mail: caroline.palmer@mcgill.ca P. Lidji : I. Peretz International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research (BRAMS), Université de Montréal, Quebec, Canada P. Lidji UNESCOG, Department of Psychology, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium Introduction When people clap or tap to auditory events, they are often demonstrating entrainment (Large & Jones, 1999; Wilson & Wilson, 2005), a natural tendency to synchronize move- ments with the temporal regularities of external stimuli. These forms of entrainment entail a perceptual encoding of a stimulus periodicity, which increases the ability to predict the timing of upcoming events. Dynamical systems theories (Large & Jones, 1999; Large & Palmer, 2002) suggest that listeners’ auditory–motor synchroniza- tion can be modeled with internal oscillators whose periods become aligned with the underlying beat of an auditory stimulus. Listeners can entrain with rhythmic sequences at different hierarchical levels (Jones & Boltz, 1989). For example, one can find people on a dance floor who move with every musical beat (lower hierarchical level), while others move with every other musical beat (higher hierarchical level), and still others move every four beats (higher hierarchical level). The preferred hierar- chical level at which people tap to simple auditory pulses is influenced by age (adults tap at higher hierarchical levels than do children) and by musical training (musicians synchronize their movements with higher hierarchical levels than do nonmusicians; Drake, Jones, & Baruch, 2000). Thus, auditory experience may influence the pattern of entrainment. Most examples of motor entrainment refer to auditory events that convey a regular beat, such as music. Do people also entrain to stimuli that may not display a regular beat, such as speech (Patel, 2008)? Despite the heavily debated nature of temporal regularity in world languages, there is evidence that speakers exhibit