The direction of word stress processing in German: evidence from a working memory paradigm

Domahs, Frank; Grande, M.; Huber, Walter; Domahs, Ulrike

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00574

Cited by 3 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…However, there was no significant correlation between WM capacity and stress assignment to the penultimate syllable, which has been claimed to be the default stress pattern in German (e.g., Wiese, 1996). Domahs F. et al (2014) argued that this pattern of results supported the assumption of leftward stress processing in German, according to which, the antepenultimate stress is more cognitively demanding than the ultimate stress for German speakers. Therefore, participants with good WM capacity were able to use antepenultimate stress, while participants with limited WM capacity tended to avoid it and use more ultimate stress.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 69%

“…First, the processing of word stress in EP has been claimed to occur in a leftward fashion (Mateus and Andrade, 2000; Vigário, 2003). From a cognitive perspective, processing costs should increase with increasing distance of stress position from the starting point of computation (e.g., Domahs F. et al, 2014). Since stress computation works from right to left in EP, penultimate stress should be computationally more demanding than ultimate stress.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Heisterueber et al (2014) also reported that at both the behavioral and neuro-functional levels German speakers exhibited inter-individual differences in word stress processing, which might be attributed to individual working memory (WM) span. Moreover, in a non-word reading task Domahs F. et al (2014) found that German speakers’ individual WM capacity was positively correlated with their assignment of main stress to the antepenultimate syllable, and negatively correlated with the assignment of stress to the final syllable. However, there was no significant correlation between WM capacity and stress assignment to the penultimate syllable, which has been claimed to be the default stress pattern in German (e.g., Wiese, 1996).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…Besides, previous research has shown that stress processing depends crucially upon memory load (e.g., Dupoux et al, 1997, 2001; Peperkamp et al, 2010; Domahs F. et al, 2014; Heisterueber et al, 2014). For example, Dupoux et al (1997) found that in an ABX task French participants had significantly more difficulties in lexical stress discrimination than Spanish participants, while in an AX task French participants could accurately detect the acoustic correlates of lexical stress.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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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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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 69%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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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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“…This leads to a general need for lexical specification of stress in German. However, beyond lexicalization there is accumulating evidence for a role of syllable weight in stress assignment, such that light final and closed prefinal syllables are associated with penultimate stress whereas (super) heavy final syllables, especially if combined with light prefinal syllables, lead to stress on the antepenultimate or ultimate syllable ( Janßen, 2003 ; Janßen and Domahs, 2008 ; Röttger et al, 2012 ; Domahs et al, 2014 ). Graphemic structure has an influence which is at least partly independent from phonological structure as can be seen in the case of complex graphemes which consist of two or three letters but correspond to only one phoneme (e.g., <sch>, <ch>).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bono Bo and Fla Mingo: Reflections of Speech Prosody in German Second Graders’ Writing to Dictation

Domahs¹,

Blessing²,

Kauschke³

et al. 2016

Front. Psychol.

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Written German is characterized by an underrepresentation of prosody. During writing acquisition, children have to tackle the question which prosodic features are realized by what means – if any. We examined traces of speech prosody in German children’s writing to dictation. A sample of 79 second graders were asked to write down eight sentences to dictation. We analyzed three potential reflections of speech prosody in children’s dictations: (a) Merging of preposition and definite article, potentially preferred after monosyllabic prepositions as in this case preposition and article may melt to the canonical trochaic foot in German. (b) The introduction of orthographically inadequate graphemic border markings within trisyllabic animal names, respecting borders of prosodic units like foot or syllable. (c) Omissions of the definite article in non-optimal prosodic positions, deviating from the preferred strong-weak rhythm. The occurrence of border markings was evaluated via graded perceptual judgments. We found no evidence for inter-word border markings being influenced by prosodic context, probably due to a ceiling effect. However, word-internal markings within animal names, although rarely occurring in general, were clearly influenced by prosodic structure: Most of them were produced at borders of feet or syllables, while significantly fewer markings were perceived at borders of syllable constituents or within consonant clusters. Moreover, we observed significantly more omissions of the definite article in non-optimal prosodic positions compared to potentially optimal positions. Thus, our results provide first evidence from writing acquisition for prosodic influences on writing in a language with scarce graphemic marking of prosody.

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Modelling German Word Stress

Tomaschek

Domahs

2023

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Standard linguistic and psycholinguistic approaches to stress assignment argue that the position of word stress is determined on the basis of abstract information such as syllable weight and number of syllables in the word. In the present study, we contrasted this approach with a perspective based on learning analogies according to which speakers learn to associate word form cues to stress position. To do so, we use a simple two-layer neural network trained with an error-driven learning mechanism to predict stress position in German morphologically simple and complex words. We find that networks trained on word forms outperformed networks trained on cues that represent abstract information. Moreover, most standard approaches assign stress from right to left. We tested this proposal and found that in morphologically simple words, assignment from right yielded better results than assignment from left, supporting the standard approach. By contrast, in morphologically complex words assignment from left outperformed assignment from right. We discuss the implications of our results for psycholinguistic theories of stress assignment by taking into account word form cues, abstract cues, assignment direction, and the representation of stress in the mental lexicon.

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The direction of word stress processing in German: evidence from a working memory paradigm

Cited by 3 publications

References 23 publications

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

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

Bono Bo and Fla Mingo: Reflections of Speech Prosody in German Second Graders’ Writing to Dictation

Modelling German Word Stress

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