hide
Free keywords:
-
Abstract:
This paper investigated how foreign-accented stress cues affect on-line speech comprehension in
British speakers of English. While unstressed English vowels are usually reduced to /@/, Dutch
speakers of English only slightly centralize them. Speakers of both languages differentiate stress by
suprasegmentals (duration and intensity). In a cross-modal priming experiment, English listeners
heard sentences ending in monosyllabic prime fragments—produced by either an English or a
Dutch speaker of English—and performed lexical decisions on visual targets. Primes were either
stress-matching (“ab” excised from absurd), stress-mismatching (“ab” from absence), or unrelated
(“pro” from profound) with respect to the target (e.g., ABSURD). Results showed a priming effect
for stress-matching primes only when produced by the English speaker, suggesting that vowel quality
is a more important cue to word stress than suprasegmental information. Furthermore, for visual
targets with word-initial secondary stress that do not require vowel reduction (e.g., CAMPAIGN),
resembling the Dutch way of realizing stress, there was a priming effect for both speakers. Hence,
our data suggest that Dutch-accented English is not harder to understand in general, but it is in
instances where the language-specific implementation of lexical stress differs across languages.
