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

Abstract

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.

Early Visual Attention Abilities and Audiovisual Speech Processing in 5–7 Month-Old Down Syndrome and Typically Developing Infants

“…Infants’ eye-gaze was recorded while watching 4-s-long videos of an animated character (Noddy) talking and waving at the infant ( Figure 1 ). Videos were part of a stress perception task where they were inserted after each block as a reinforcer [ 39 ]. Auditorily, four different reinforcing passages were paired with the same video (e.g., “That’s it!…”

Phonetics of European Portuguese stress: A nonce word experiment

“…Note that duration is shown to play an important role in early stress perception in EP. Using an anticipatory eye movement paradigm implemented with eye-tracking,Frota et al (2020) demonstrate that EP-learning infants at about five or six months are sensitive to the trochaic/iambic stress contrast. In particular, infants' perception was tested in the absence of vowel quality cues to stress.…”