Basic research in phonology, resources and applications–the case of frequency

Vigário, Marina; Martins, Fernando; Cruz, Marisa; Paulino, Nuno; Frota, Sónia

doi:10.20396/cel.v59i3.8651000

Cited by 2 publications

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References 18 publications

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“…1Indeed, vowel quality is highly correlated with stress position in EP: stressed syllables always exhibit unreduced vowels, whereas unstressed syllables may show reduced vowels (the most common pattern due to phonological vowel reduction) or unreduced ones. A computation of the distribution of reduced and unreduced vowels in unstressed positions, using the 5,294 most frequent word types from the FrePOP Lexicon (Vigário et al, 2015) which represent a corpus of over 2.6 million tokens, shows that 91.5% of all vowels in unstressed position are reduced vowels.…”

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Revisiting Stress “Deafness” in European Portuguese – A Behavioral and ERP Study

Vigário

Correia

et al. 2018

Front. Psychol.

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European Portuguese (EP) is a language with variable stress, and the main cues for stress are duration and vowel reduction. A previous behavioral study has reported a stress “deafness” effect in EP when vowel quality cues are unavailable. The present study recorded both event-related potentials (ERPs) and behavioral data to examine the stress processing by native EP speakers in the absence of the vowel quality cues. Our behavioral result was consistent with previous research, showing that when vowel reduction is absent EP speakers demonstrated a stress “deafness” effect similar to that found in speakers of languages with fixed stress or without any lexical stress marking. In the ERP task, both the trochaic and iambic conditions yielded mismatch negativity (MMN) and late negativity, suggesting that EP speakers are able to discriminate the two stress patterns without vowel reduction at the pre-attentive stage. Moreover, the ERP and behavioral data revealed compatible results regarding the pattern of stress bias in EP. In the EPR task, the MMN and late negativity components were more negative and span over a larger temporal window in the iambic condition than in the trochaic condition, indicating a higher sensitivity for the iambic stress pattern. In the behavioral task, EP speakers responded more accurately and more quickly to the iambic stress. These results match recent developmental findings in the acquisition of stress, but speak against the dominant view in EP phonological literature which assumes penultimate stress to be the regular stress pattern. In addition, both the ERP and the behavioral data showed that EP speakers’ stress processing was influenced by their working memory (WM) capacity. The participants with high WM capacity outperformed the participants with limited WM capacity in the iambic condition. In sum, our results broaden the current knowledge on stress processing by EP speakers at both the pre-attentive and attentive levels.

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Revisiting Stress “Deafness” in European Portuguese – A Behavioral and ERP Study

Vigário

Correia

et al. 2018

Front. Psychol.

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“…Phonological vowel reduction is a general phenomenon in the language affecting all unstressed positions (with few exceptions), so that the contrast between low, mid, and high vowels found in stressed syllables (/i, e, ɛ, a, u, o, ɔ/) does not hold in unstressed syllables. In these syllables, over 90% of all vowels are those that belong to the reduced vowel system, i.e., [i, ɨ, ɐ, u] (data based on the FrePoP Lexicon, Vigário et al, 2015 ). Behavioral findings from adult perception have shown that, in the absence of vowel quality cues, EP speakers are unable to perceive stress contrasts, demonstrating a stress “deafness” effect similar to that found in speakers of languages with fixed stress or no lexical stress ( Correia et al, 2015 ; Lu et al, 2018 ).…”

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European Portuguese-Learning Infants Look Longer at Iambic Stress: New Data on Language Specificity in Early Stress Perception

et al. 2020

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The ability to perceive lexical stress patterns has been shown to develop in language-specific ways. However, previous studies have examined this ability in languages that are either clearly stress-based (favoring the development of a preference for trochaic stress, like English and German) or syllable-based (favoring the development of no stress preferences, like French, Spanish, and Catalan) and/or where the frequency distributions of stress patterns provide clear data for a predominant pattern (like English and Hebrew). European Portuguese (EP) is a different type of language, which presents conflicting sets of cues related to rhythm, frequency, and stress correlates that challenge existing accounts of early stress perception. Using an anticipatory eye movement (AEM) paradigm implemented with eye-tracking, EP-learning infants at 5–6 months demonstrated sensitivity to the trochaic/iambic stress contrast, with evidence of asymmetrical perception or preference for iambic stress. These results are not predicted by the rhythmic account of developing stress perception, and suggest that the language-particular phonological patterns impacting the frequency of trochaic and iambic stress, beyond lexical words with two or more syllables, together with the prosodic correlates of stress, drive the early acquisition of lexical stress. Our findings provide the first evidence of sensitivity to stress patterns in the presence of segmental variability by 5–6 months, and highlight the importance of testing developing stress perception in languages with diverse combinations of rhythmic, phonological, and phonetic properties.

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Basic research in phonology, resources and applications–the case of frequency

Cited by 2 publications

References 18 publications

Revisiting Stress “Deafness” in European Portuguese – A Behavioral and ERP Study

Revisiting Stress “Deafness” in European Portuguese – A Behavioral and ERP Study

European Portuguese-Learning Infants Look Longer at Iambic Stress: New Data on Language Specificity in Early Stress Perception

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