Stress “deafness” in a Language with Fixed Word Stress: An ERP Study on Polish

Abstract

The aim of the present contribution was to examine the factors influencing the prosodic processing in a language with predictable word stress. For Polish, a language with fixed penultimate stress but several well-defined exceptions, difficulties in the processing and representation of prosodic information have been reported (e.g., Peperkamp and Dupoux, 2002). The present study utilized event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the factors influencing prosodic processing in Polish. These factors are (i) the predictability of stress and (ii) the prosodic structure in terms of metrical feet. Polish native speakers were presented with correctly and incorrectly stressed Polish words and instructed to judge the correctness of the perceived stress patterns. For some stress violations, an early negativity was found which was interpreted as a reflection of an error-detection mechanism. In addition, exceptional stress patterns (=antepenultimate stress) and post-lexical (=initial) stress evoked a task-related positivity effect (P300) whose amplitude and latency is correlated with the degree of anomaly and deviation from an expectation. In contrast, violations involving the default (=penultimate stress) did not produce such an effect. This asymmetrical result is interpreted to reflect that Polish native speakers are less sensitive to the default pattern than to the exceptional or post-lexical patterns. Behavioral results are orthogonal to the electrophysiological results showing that Polish speakers had difficulties to reject any kind of stress violation. Thus, on a meta-linguistic level Polish speakers appeared to be stress-“deaf” for any kind of stress manipulation, whereas the neural reactions differentiate between the default and lexicalized patterns.

Revisiting “stress deafness” in European Portuguese: An ERP study

“…O Perceptual discrimination may occur at the unintentional level, but not at the intentional/behavioral level O Consistent with findings for Polish: Polish speakers are "deaf" to stress manipulations in a behavioral task but show different neural responses towards default stress vs. exceptions (Domahs et al 2012) O Polish is a fixed stress language (penult stress), with well-defined exceptions O Neural response to stress contrasts even in languages with (some degree of) stress "deafness" Revisiting "Stress Deafness" in European Portuguese -An ERP study…”

Rhythmic structure effects on glottalisation: A study of different speech styles in Polish and German

“…Domahs et al (2008) found evidence that the hierarchical organization of syllables and feet plays a role in word stress processing in German. In contrast, no such evidence was found for Polish (Domahs et al 2012). …”

“…Lexical stress is weakly expressed acoustically, especially in the duration dimension, a clear difference from German. However, as supported by Domahs et al (2012), prominence perception based on the expectation of lexical stress on the penultimate syllable is robust.…”

“…The status of secondary stress is disputed from a phonetic perspective (Dogil 1999;Steffen-Batogowa 2000) but phonologically it is believed to fall on the first syllable (Kraska-Szlenk 2003). Polish listeners are sensitive to deviations from the default penultimate pattern as shown by Domahs et al (2012) in an ERP study.…”

Special Issue: Slavic Perspectives on Prosody

“…However, only few prosodic aspects of Slavic languages have been considered 'classic' and have regularly generated debates, e.g., issues in Slavic lexical stress systems (see Dogil and Williams (1999); Peperkamp et al (2010); Newlin-Łukowicz (2012); Domahs et al (2012) for recent work on Polish stress).…”