Accent shifts in spoken noun phrases affect verification latencies of listeners in Dutch but not Canadian French

Abstract

Germanic and Romance languages (such as Dutch and French) differ in the extent to which they allow pitch accents to be moved inside spoken noun phrases (NPs). In Dutch NPs, a primary accent is usually shifted to the word that is in focus, while the unfocused words remain unaccented. In contrast, French has been argued to be much more constrained in that respect, especially regarding the extent to which it can deaccent unfocused words inside NPs. Given these differences in production, the current study explores whether listeners of these languages actually use different listening strategies in accent processing. Dutch and Canadian-French listeners were asked to verify as fast as possible whether the content of the second of two utterances was an accurate description of a picture. Dutch listeners were faster when the primary accent in that second utterance occurred on a word that represented new information, whereas French listeners were not affected by accent shifts. This demonstrates that there are language-specific constraints on accent processing.