Are Serbian and English listeners insensitive to lexical pitch accents in Serbian?

Abstract

The paper investigated possible perceptual insensitivity effects in the perception of lexical pitch accents by native and non-native listeners, that is, by Serbian and English listeners, respectively. The objective of the study was to explore which word-prosodic categories listeners used when they were required to contrast and recall sequences of lexical pitch accents. To that effect, Serbian and English listeners performed a Sequence Recall Task (SRT) in which they contrasted pairs of non-words with different Serbian lexical pitch accent types, and recalled the sequences of these non-words under different memory load conditions. Listeners' answers were coded correct and incorrect and the accuracy scores between the groups were compared and analyzed. Both groups had almost identical levels of accuracy and they performed well above chance level on each contrast. Neither group exhibited any effects of perceptual insensitivity to lexical pitch accents. English (non-native) listeners did not differ in their performance from native Serbian listeners, which, contrary to what previous research suggested, implied that one's native language word-prosodic category inventory did not preclude the encoding of non-native word-prosodic categories. Instead, non-native listeners were capable of deploying different prosodic resources such as post-lexical pitch accents to recall the sequences.