Segmental and suprasegmental contributions to spoken-word recognition in dutch

Abstract

Words can be distinguished by segmental differences or by suprasegmental differences or both. Studies from English suggest that suprasegmentals play little role in human spoken-word recognition; English stress, however, is nearly always unambiguously coded in segmental structure (vowel quality); this relationship is less close in Dutch. The present study directly compared the effects of segmental and suprasegmental mispronunciation on word recognition in Dutch. There was a strong effect of suprasegmental mispronunciation, suggesting that Dutch listeners do exploit suprasegmental information in word recognition. Previous findings indicating the effects of mis-stressing for Dutch differ with stress position were replicated only when segmental change was involved, suggesting that this is an effect of segmental rather than suprasegmental processing.

Stress and lexical activation in dutch

“…The principal finding was that mis-stressing slowed RTs and raised error rates for judgements of semantic relatedness between a visually presented prime word and a subsequent spoken word. This is confirming evidence that, as we previously observed with this task [5], recognition of a spoken Dutch word is adversely affected by mis-stressing even when vowel quality remains unchanged. Adverse effects of mis-stressing have also been reported in other word recognition tasks with Dutch materials [10,11].…”

“…Adverse effects of mis-stressing have also been reported in other word recognition tasks with Dutch materials [10,11]. Although other studies [5,10,11] have reported different patterns of effects in bisyllables with initial stress (atlas) and final stress (atleet), here initially-and finallystressed words produced closely similar patterns.…”

“…In Dutch, however, segmental and suprasegmental mispronunciation have closely parallel inhibitory effects on word recognition. Koster and Cutler [5] demonstrated this using a semantic judgement task, in which listeners see a prime word on a screen, then hear a spoken word, and their task is to judge whether the two are related. Changes in stress (not affecting vowel quality) and changes in vowel quality (not affecting stress) had almost exactly the same deleterious effect on response time (RT) in this task.…”

“…In most mis-stressing experiments (as in [1][2][3][4][5]), each stimulus corresponds to only one word candidate, correctly or incorrectly pronounced. Another way to consider mis-stressing, however, is to assess its effect as a mismatch which rules out one word candidate in favour of a competing candidate.…”

“…The present study addressed this same issue of the effect of mis-stressing on lexical activation, using Koster and Cutler's [5] semantic judgement task.…”