On-line perception of lexical stress in English and Spanish: The effects of sentence intonation and vowel reduction.

Abstract

Previous research shows that speakers of stress-accent languages rely on pitch-accents to perceive word stress in sentences spoken with declarative intonation, while in unaccented sentences, like post-focal contexts, they rely on other cues, i.e., duration in Spanish or vowel reduction in English. However, there is no experimental evidence on the effect that sentence intonation has in the “on-line” perception of word stress across languages. This experiment examines whether listeners detect word stress faster in unaccented stretches of speech that are preceded by a landmark in the sentence melody, i.e., the focal pitch-accent that always precedes a post-focal sentence, than in unaccented contexts not preceded by a landmark, i.e., reporting clauses. Results show that Spanish listeners identified target words at the beginning and end of post-focal contexts with similar reaction times, while in reporting clauses, target words placed at the end were identified faster than those placed at the beginning. Preliminary results for English show no significant differences. Thus, Spanish listeners re-weight cues to word stress on-line taking into account the patterns of sentence intonation. Sentence melody does not have such a strong effect in English, possibly because vowel reduction is a sufficient cue to an effective perception of word stress.