Recognition memory for foreign language lexical stress

Abstract

This study investigated whether English speakers retained the lexical stress patterns of newly learned Spanish words. Participants studied spoken Spanish words (e.g., DUcha [shower], ciuDAD [city]; stressed syllables in capital letters) and subsequently performed a recognition task, in which studied words were presented with the same lexical stress pattern (DUcha) or the opposite lexical stress pattern (CIUdad). Participants were able to discriminate same-from opposite-stress words, indicating that lexical stress was encoded and used in the recognition process. Word-form similarity to English also influenced outcomes, with Spanish cognate words and words with trochaic stress (MANgo) being recognized more often and more quickly than Spanish cognate words with iambic stress (soLAR) and noncognates. The results suggest that while segmental and suprasegmental features of the native language influence foreign word recognition, foreign lexical stress patterns are encoded and not discarded in memory.Keywords Lexical stress . Auditory word recognition . Bilingualism . Psycholinguistics . Language acquisition Lexical stress refers to the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables within single words. For example, the word pencil is pronounced with more stress on the first syllable (/′pen/) than on the second syllable (/səl/). The present study employed a recognition memory task to investigate two research questions: first, whether English speakers use foreign lexical stress cues to recognize newly learned Spanish words and, second, the extent to which similarity to English word forms influences the recognition process. Lexical stress cues in English and Spanish

Representation of second language phonology

“…L2 learners from such backgrounds also perform poorly on tests of stress mastery in their L2 (Tremblay, 2008, for French learners of English; Schmidt-Kassow, Rothermich, Schwartze, & Kotz, 2011, for French learners of German; Archibald, 1997, for Chinese and Japanese learners of English), even when they can accurately perceive an equivalent nonlinguistic contrast (Schmidt-Kassow et al, 2011). Conversely, listeners whose L1 is another stress language are able to perceive and store the stress patterns of their L2, even if the L1 and L2 stress placement rules differ (Cooper, Cutler, & Wales, 2002, for Dutch learners of English; Guion, Harada, & Clark, 2004, for Spanish learners of English; Suárez & Goh, 2013, for English learners of Spanish). This points to the likelihood that explicitly providing stress information would be useful only to learners whose L1 was also a stress language (such as English learners of Russian; Hayes-Harb & Hacking, 2013).…”

“…Nonetheless, the suprasegmental cues are present in English speech, and they can be put to good use by L2 listeners whose L1 does require attention to such stress cues (Cooper et al, 2002; Cutler, 2009). Furthermore, that English listeners to Spanish (which has no vowel reduction, and hence no stressed–unstressed vowel difference for English listeners to exploit) can perform well with Spanish stress (Suárez & Goh, 2013) suggests that the English-speaking listeners’ native patterns have laid the groundwork for perception of stress distinctions in a non-English manner (i.e., using the Spanish-like suprasegmental cues) as well. However, it may still be the case that in an L2 that does have vowel reduction but does not use it as systematically as English in unstressed syllables (e.g., Dutch or Russian), English listeners may experience difficulty in storing the precise phonological form (Hayes-Harb & Hacking, 2013), just as learners from such languages often fail to store and produce English stress distinctions in a nativelike manner (causing consequent comprehension difficulties for native English listeners: Braun, Lemhöfer, & Mani, 2011; Cutler, in press).…”