Abstract
A Sequence Recall Task with disyllabic stimuli contrasting either for the location of prosodic prominence or for the medial consonant was administered to 150 subjects equally divided over five language groups. Scores showed a significant interaction between type of contrast and language group, such that groups did not differ on their performance on the consonant contrast, while two language groups, Dutch and Japanese, significantly outperformed the three other language groups (French, Indonesian and Persian) on the prosodic contrast. Since only Dutch and Japanese words have unpredictable stress or accent locations, the results are interpreted to mean that stress “deafness” is a property of speakers of languages without lexical stress or tone markings, as opposed to the presence of stress or accent contrasts in phrasal (post-lexical) constructions. Moreover, the degree of transparency between the locations of stress/tone and word boundaries did not appear to affect our results, despite earlier claims that this should have an effect. This finding is of significance for speech processing, language acquisition and phonological theory.
Highlights
BackgroundIn addition to vowels and consonants, the words of a language may be specified for stress and tone
We failed to find any significant differences between participant groups on the segmental contrast, which is an indication that there was no need for this baseline in the analysis of the prosodic contrast scores
Our Sequence Recall Task (SRT) experiment with 150 subjects divided over five participant language groups produced results that support a number of positions we have taken in the introduction
Summary
In addition to vowels and consonants, the words of a language may be specified for stress and tone. Stress in languages like English is an obligatory syllabic prominence feature of major class words [2]. Such words can be grammatical utterances with or without additional unstressed function words. Many stressed syllables are spoken without pitch accents, only one of which needs to occur in any utterance. In ELephants can NO longer be made to perform in CIRcuses, pitch accents may occur on the capitalized syllables, while long, made and form are stressed syllables that may be PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0143968. In ELephants can NO longer be made to perform in CIRcuses, pitch accents may occur on the capitalized syllables, while long, made and form are stressed syllables that may be PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0143968 December 7, 2015
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