Role Of Lexical Stress Research Articles

The role of lexical stress in spoken English word recognition by listeners of English and Taiwan Mandarin

Abstract Two perceptual experiments investigated how the suprasegmental information of monosyllables is perceived and exploited in spoken English word recognition by listeners of English and Taiwan Mandarin (TM). Using an auditory lexical decision task in which correctly stressed English words and mis-stressed nonwords (e.g. camPAIGN vs. *CAMpaign) were presented for lexical decisions, Experiment I demonstrated that TM listeners could perceive the differences between stressed and unstressed syllables with native-like accuracy and rapidity. To examine how the perceived suprasegmental contrast would constrain English lexical access, Experiment II was conducted. It used a cross-modal fragment priming task in which a lexical decision had to be made for a visually presented English word or nonword following an auditory prime, which was a spoken word-initial syllable. The results showed that English and TM listeners recognized the displayed word (e.g. campus) faster both after a stress-matching (e.g. CAM-) prime and a stress-mismatching (e.g. cam-) prime than after a control prime (e.g. MOUN-, with mismatching segments). This indicates that suprasegmental information does not inhibit a segmentally matching but suprasegmentally mismatching word candidate for both the two groups, although TM is a language where lexical prosody is expressed syllabically and its listeners tend to interpret lexical stress tonally. Yet, the two groups’ responses were slower after the stressed primes than after the unstressed ones, presumably because the former generally had more possible continuations than the latter do. It is therefore concluded that when recognizing spoken English words, both the native and non-native (TM-speaking) listeners can exploit the suprasegmental cues of monosyllables, which, however, are not so effective that they will outweigh the segmental cues.

Sensitivity to the acoustic correlates of lexical stress and their relationship to reading in skilled readers.

The role of suprasegmental information in reading processes is a growing area of interest, and sensitivity to lexical stress has been shown to explain unique variance in reading development. However, less is known about its role in skilled reading. This study aimed to investigate the acoustic features of suprasegmental information using a same/different cross-modal matching task. Sixty-four adult participants completed standardized measures of reading accuracy, reading speed, and comprehension and performed an experimental task. The experimental task required the participants to identify whether non-speech acoustic sequences matched the characteristics of written words. The findings indicated differences in responses depending on where the lexical stress was required for the word. Moreover, evidence was found to support the view that amplitude information is part of the word knowledge retrieval process in skilled reading. The findings are discussed relative to models of reading and the role of lexical stress in lexical access.

The Relative Weight of Statistical and Prosodic Cues in Speech Segmentation: A Matter of Language-(In)dependency and of Signal Quality

In an artificial language setting, we investigated the relative weight of statistical cues (transitional probabilities, TPs) in comparison to two prosodic cues, Intonational Phrases (IPs, a language-independent cue) and lexical stress (a language-dependent cue). The signal quality was also manipulated through white-noise superimposition. Both IPs and TPs were highly resilient to physical degradation of the signal. An overall performance gain was found when these cues were congruent, but when they were incongruent IPs prevailed over TPs (Experiment 1). After ensuring that duration is treated by Portuguese listeners as a correlate of lexical stress (Experiment 2A), the role of lexical stress and TPs in segmentation was evaluated in Experiment 2B. Lexical stress effects only emerged with physically degraded signal, constraining the extraction of TP-words to the ones supported by both TPs and IPs. Speech segmentation does not seem to be the product of one preponderant cue acting as a filter of the outputs of another, lower-weighted cue. Instead, it mainly depends on the listening conditions, and the weighting of the cues according to their role in a particular language.

Intelligibility and the Listener: The Role of Lexical Stress

For some 30 years, intelligibility has been recognized as an appropriate goal for pronunciation instruction, yet remarkably little is known about the factors that make a language learner's speech intelligible. Studies have traced correlations between features of nonnative speech and native speakers' intelligibility judgements. They have tended to regard prosody as a global phenomenon and to view intelligibility as primarily a quality of the speaker. The present article focuses on a single prosodic element, lexical stress, and shifts the focus of study to the listener. It draws on findings in psycholinguistics that have rarely been applied to second language (L2) contexts. Groups of listeners were asked to transcribe recorded material in which the variables of lexical stress and vowel quality were manipulated. Recognizing the extent to which English is employed in international contexts, the study contrasted the effect of the variables on native listeners (NLs) with their effect on nonnative listeners (NNLs). NLs and NNLs were found to respond in remarkably similar ways to the problems posed by stress misallocation. For both groups, the extent to which intelligibility was compromised depended greatly on the direction in which stress was shifted and whether changes in vowel quality were involved.

Word recognition in individuals with left and right hemisphere damage: The role of lexical stress

Lexical stress patterns appear to be important in word recognition processes in normal individuals. The present investigation employed a lexical decision task to assess whether left (LHD) and right hemisphere damaged (RHD) patients are similarly sensitive to stress patterns in lexical access. The results confirmed that individuals without brain damage are influenced by stress patterns, as indicated by increased lexical decision latencies to incorrectly stressed word and nonword stimuli. The data for the LHD patients revealed an effect of stress for real word targets only, whereas the reaction time data for the RHD patients as a group showed no significant influence of stress pattern. However, there was a great deal of individual variability in performance. The latency and error rate findings suggest that LHD patients and non-brain-damaged individuals are both sensitive to lexical stress in word recognition, but the LHD patients are more likely to treat incorrectly stressed items as nonwords. The results are discussed in relation to theories of the hemispheric lateralization of prosodic processing and the role of lexical stress in word recognition.

The Role of Lexical Stress during Spoken-Word Recognition

The Role of Lexical Stress during Spoken-Word Recognition

Stress and context in auditory word recognition

Recent work in psycholinguistics has revealed that the role of lexical stress in auditory word recognition may be a complex one involving other potential sources of information. In the present investigation, the nature of lexical stress effects on auditory word recognition in context is examined. The ability of subjects to identify words based on the prosodic pattern of the word is examined for the words in isolation and in a sentence context. The results revealed a small influence of stress on the identification of the stimulus waveforms relative to a large effect of context. The data indicate that lexical stress is used in the identification of the words; however, its role is minor compared to the importance of contextual information.

The role of lexical stress in word recognition and pronunciation

In the present paper several studies are reviewed that are relevant to lexical-stress assignment. The questions asked concern the form of representation of stress and its role in the perception and identification of words in auditory and visual word recognition. The role of stress is also considered in the computation of phonology, as are the linguistic and orthographic constraints that influence its assignment during reading.