Stress and lexical activation in Dutch

Abstract

Dutch listeners were slower to make judgements about semantic relatedness between a spoken target word (e.g. atLEET 'athlete') and a visual prime word (e.g. SPORT) when the spoken word was mis-stressed. However, false alarm rates for unrelated pairs (e.g. SPORT - atLAS) were low, i.e. stress information did not completely rule out suprasegmentally mismatching words. This finding is consistent with spoken-word recognition models involving multiple activation and inter-word competition.