Two perception experiments were run with Mandarin Chinese and Italian speakers. The aim was to comparatively examine the rhythmical role played by sentence accents. This study pursued previous work on the rhythmic features of Chinese and Italian as analyzed by means of the Control/Compensation model, according to which rhythm produces effects at two levels: level-I (phonotactical) and level-II (sentential). While previous work addressed the situation at level-I, the present study dealt with level-II, to check the respective strength of the accentual and syllabic oscillators.

Index Terms: rhythm, Control/Compensation model, sentence accent.