Perceiving unstressed vowels in foreign-accented English
Publication year
2011Source
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 129, 1, (2011), pp. 376-387ISSN
Publication type
Article / Letter to editor

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Organization
SW OZ DCC CO
Journal title
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
Volume
vol. 129
Issue
iss. 1
Languages used
English (eng)
Page start
p. 376
Page end
p. 387
Subject
DI-BCB_DCC_Theme 1: Language and Communication; DI-BCB_DCC_Theme 2: Perception, Action and Control; PsycholinguisticsAbstract
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 /partial derivative/, 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
This item appears in the following Collection(s)
- Academic publications [202563]
- Electronic publications [100732]
- Faculty of Social Sciences [27083]
- Open Access publications [69477]
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