I ran an experiment a few years ago where I had musicians and non
musicians (American native English speakers) simply tap along with a
number of basic rhythms. Results were consistent with other findings that:
1) People select isolated beats and beats preceding longer periods of
silence as more salient (where they tend to align there taps).
2) Musicians take longer to start tapping and tend to tap at slightly
faster rates. They are also more consistent in their tapping behaviors and
are more likely to choose to tap in "multi-cycle" patterns.
3) In a few cases, how a rhythm was initiated had some influence on how
people tapped along, but for the most part how a rhythm was initiated did
not have much to do with selection of tapping behavior.
There's much more to it. Here's the poster with the details:
http://www.fluidbase.com/vitae/SMPCposter02.html
One of these days I would like to run this experiment on people in
non-Western cultures and at different tempos. I anticipate language
backgrounds will influence these results..