Abstract
This article presents neurolinguistic data on word stress perception in Cairene Arabic, in comparison to previous results on German and Turkish. The main goal is to investigate how central properties of stress systems such as predictability of stress and metrical structure are reflected in the prosodic processing of words. Cairene Arabic is a language with a regular foot-based word stress system, leading to highly predictable placement of word stress. An ERP study on Cairene Arabic is reported, in which a stress violation paradigm is used to investigate the factors predictability of stress and foot structure. The results of the experiment show that for Cairene Arabic the internal structure of prosodic words in terms of feet determines prosodic processing. This structure effect is complemented by a frequency effect for stress patterns.
Highlights
Recent crosslinguistic studies on word stress perception revealed a correlation between the predictability of stress positions in a native language and the sensitivity to stress properties in second languages
The current study aims at investigating whether speakers of Cairene Arabic are partly insensitive to stress manipulations because stress in Cairene Arabic is predictable, or whether the evaluation of stress differs between violations involving foot restructuring and those in which the prosodic structure is maintained
The question arises whether the effect patterns found in the study on Cairene Arabic can be interpreted along the same lines as the results found for German
Summary
Recent crosslinguistic studies on word stress perception revealed a correlation between the predictability of stress positions in a native language and the sensitivity to stress properties in second languages. Speakers of a language with invariable stress (e.g., French) are less sensitive to stress information than speakers of a language with variable stress (e.g., Spanish). The more variable stress positions in a language are the more likely it is that stress information has to be lexically specified. In more recent studies, Peperkamp et al (2010) suggest the crucial factor for stress sensitivity to be the amount of exceptional stress in a given language. The fewer cases of exceptional stress the more likely that speakers show reduced sensitivity to stress information
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