The Roles of Word Stress and Vowel Harmony in Speech Segmentation

Abstract

Three experiments investigated the role of word stress and vowel harmony in speech segmentation. Finnish has fixed word stress on the initial syllable, and vowels from a front or back harmony set cannot co-occur within a word. In Experiment 1, we replicated the results of Suomi, McQueen, and Cutler (1997) showing that Finns use a mismatch in vowel harmony as a word boundary cue when the target-initial syllable is unstressed. Listeners found it easier to detect words such asHYmyinPUhymy(harmony mismatch) than inPYhymy(no harmony mismatch). In Experiment 2, words had stressed target-initial syllables (HYmyas inpyHYmyorpuHYmy). Reaction times were now faster and the vowel harmony effect was greatly reduced. In Experiment 3, Finnish, Dutch, and French listeners learned to segment an artificial language. Performance was best when the phonological properties of the artificial language matched those of the native one. Finns profited, as in the previous experiments, from vowel harmony and word-initial stress; Dutch profited from word-initial stress, and French did not profit either from vowel-harmony or from word-initial stress. Vowel disharmony and word-initial stress are thus language-specific cues to word boundaries.